Ranking EVERY Neutral Special Animation in Smash Ultimate

okay so i just did somewhat of an experimental video breaking every forward smash animation and ultimate and as it turned out people really liked that one and i got a ton of requests to turn it into a series so at least for the immediate future that's what we're gonna be doing my patrons youtube members and twitch subs voted for this episode of a few options which is how i'm going to be handling a lot of them and the option they went with by a landslide was the neutral special tier list so today we're going to be ranking every single neutral special animation in ultimate as with last time everything's on the table here how creative is it how memorable is it how well executed is it technically how good is the sound design yes i am factoring in sound design as well how good does it feel to connect with everything one final thing before we get into this and i'm sorry i know it's kind of annoying but as it turns out it actually works when i do this if you find yourself enjoying this video and think it deserves to be seen by more people please consider leaving a like and comment that's a huge factor youtube's algorithm uses alright let's do it [Applause] [Music] i don't really feel like starting every episode off with mario so instead let's do the newest character by which of course i mean the newest character where i can actually use their music without risking a copyright strike helps this is honestly a really cool move out of all of the ways that kazuya uses the devil form this may be my favorite if it's not my favorite it's definitely going to be up there obviously it comes from tekken the i-beam laser thing like it's a classic for a reason right and it looks really good here looking at it in slow motion as a reminder you don't actually judge the animation in slow motion but you can learn some interesting stuff through it so you can see for example the really smooth way that he transitions from his regular form into the devil form if you use it while he's already in devil form it is a little bit clunky watch the wings you can see they like disappear then reappear there's no real reason for that to be happening probably coding in different transitions for when the wings are overs is when they're not out not really worth the effort i get that but you know like that is a little bit of a hitch on the move it's not that big a deal especially when you consider that if you look at it at full speed it essentially doesn't read at all and again that's the main thing we're interested in laser feels fun to connect with too it is using the tekken hit leg less hit leg but compared to something like his smash attack from last episode this is honestly far less of an issue for me i think you know with a disconnected attack like the laser works perfectly fine i actually kind of appreciate the snappiness of it in terms of sound design impact itself isn't anything particularly special but i do really like the laser effect itself it's so classic it's a very sci-fi pew pew kind of deal not gonna say it a hundred percent fits kazia yeah i don't really care where it's sourced from but whatever it's fun particle effects on the beam itself aren't anything we haven't seen before but i do appreciate that there's a very clear central point that really shows how clean it is and how straight it is but you've also got some sort of chaotic energy on the side compared to something like say rob's mechanical laser beam this certainly looks more chaotic and i don't know if organic is quite the right word for it but i think you understand where i'm coming from with that and then i really like kazia's pose like with a lot of the tekken animations it's got a stiffness to it but a stiffness that actually feels appropriate and then almost kind of like old-timey villain i don't necessarily know if that's what they were going for but it's certainly what it reminds me of honestly off to a really strong start this is one of my favorite kazuya animations if not my favorite cozley animation let's do the rob laser while we're here why not rob as i mentioned the laser itself doesn't really look anywhere near as chaotic as khazia is does appropriate for the source material but i'm still going to say a bit less interesting as a result you can see it there for the base version of the laser and the little puffy does when he's out of energy and then the big version when it's at maximum charge this one i actually think looks pretty cool weirdly enough i maybe find it a bit less satisfying to actually use than the basic mid-level charge though speaking of charge one of the things that i find neat about rob is that he's got a couple of visual indicators built directly onto his design which you can do if he's a robot so if i fire the laser look at the light on top of his head it's depleted and then as time goes on you can see now he can fire the mid-level charge of the laser again then mid-level charges back and if you watch it's going to turn into a full charge [Music] and now we can fire the full laser again honestly a lot of the visual indicators and ultimate are kind of more neat details than anything else but robs actually find genuinely useful for gameplay whether i'm actually the rob player or the guy fighting rob the pose the rod makes when he fires is actually like pretty impactful he's got some nice recoil and shake going on there when he fires the laser he's putting himself into it doesn't really change between different charges that would maybe be the only thing that i could say might be improved on a little bit like he's doing the exact same shake with absolutely nothing coming out as he does with a full one and then the mid one as well so if they wanted to emphasize the strength of the charge differently that might be one way to do it i said i had more fun with a basic laser because in its base form like that's actually pretty snappy and satisfying and quick to use at full charge though it moves a little slow and there are some slow-moving projectiles that feel immensely satisfying but this isn't really one of them even a hypersense yeah he just doesn't really feel like he's hitting particularly hard maybe if there was a bit more of say a push back aspect to the laser like while they're in hitler they're actually being pushed back or had more of like a crackling electrical effect around them or something just you know really anything to make it feel like the laser was doing something more than brushing them aside i think i'm gonna go beat here for rob there's a lot of stuff that i like about it light on his head is a great touch the middle version feels fun to use but if the upper fully charged version isn't really that satisfying that is a you know a fairly decent knock against the move let's just keep the lasers rolling here fox falco and wolf fox i'm definitely gonna say has the least personality out of the space animals with his blaster you know that's not entirely an accident he's clearly supposed to be sort of more the template character that the others are built off of so fair enough and there's not no personality you can see that when fox puts his gun back into his holster it doesn't just go straight back in there's a bit of a flourish to it done slower speed okay you can see it go back into the holster there interesting the gun is actually much smaller in the holster than it is when he takes it out look at that they kind of cheat that but it's one of those things where if you do it at speed at proper scale you don't notice it who cares another easy thing to miss with this one there's actually some animation on the gun itself so single shot you can see it kind of opens up and fires and then if you keep firing multiples the chamber actually spins in between shots pretty small detail and i don't really know the technical specifications behind why a space laser would have the same kind of spinning cartridge as a revolver would but i like it despite the gun's low impact there's actually a decent little recoil animation in here as well it's pretty jumpy at full speed from this scale again if you look at it at a gameplay scale though it actually reads perfectly fine sound design for the lasers actually pretty satisfying they don't sound particularly big obviously it's not a very powerful gun but they're tight they're balanced they got a nice bit of mid-range warmth to them falco obviously has a lot more personality than fox does with his firing stance he's always been set up to be sort of you know the more cocky hot-headed like han solo-ish kind of figure among them actually a few details that kind of bother me on this one though so first off look at how much of that sort of han solo vibe he gives off here particularly with his face and now watch him open his mouth while he fires the gun i think he looks kind of like a goober when he's doing this honestly i don't think this is particularly flattering at all it's not nearly as bad when you're not zoomed in but it's not gone either the flourish of his gun weirdly is actually less defined than fox's as well he still does the spin you can see it in slow motion here like he still does spin the gun as he's putting it away but it's not out for as long and it goes back into his holster much more abruptly it might have been a functionality consideration but it's still a bit of a weird thing to do with falco right considering he's supposed to be clearly the more flashy and stylish of the two and if they were worried about spending too long holstering his gun like actually having gameplay implications they could have just given him a longer animation but had to be interruptable now apart from those issues the firing pose looks great and it always has with falco but those are kind of weird decisions now in terms of using the blaster that actually feels really good the shots themselves still very much have that kind of classic pew pew sound but the actual impact sound is much heavier there's also much more of a defined particle effect on little mac because unlike foxes this blaster does cause flinch so the animation actually reflects that and then the blaster gets the same animation as foxes does i'm gonna say it's not nearly as readable from this angle but it's a cool angle to be holding a gun at so i'll give it a pass wolf definitely has the most distinct firing pose of any of the space animals i'm not gonna say i like it nearly as much as the other two though kind of hard to put my finger on but i think the main reason is just that sense of recoil isn't quite there he's obviously kicking back but he's kicking back in a controlled way because the gun actually has gameplay functionality on the recoil the bayonet actually causes damage but even that's a little bit of a middle ground where he's committing to it maybe just a bit too lazily to really sell the fact that there is absolutely an attack on that gun there's a bit of a particle effect that you can see like the motion trail is pretty distinct on the bayonet itself you can see that slow speed there if you watch the actual bayonet like there is clearly some attention being drawn to it it glows like a lot of swords do when they're swung but the entire thing's got just a bit of a laziness to it i get that they are wanting to make wolf look you know very detached and cool but i think emphasizing the recoil just slightly more would still have been overall beneficial to the move especially since this is clearly supposed to be the strongest laser of the three i really like the particle effect for this one massive upgrade from the sort of dinky little thing he had in brawl sound design for it feels good to connect with i'm gonna say i wish it had a bit of a different firing sound i don't think that classic pew pew works nearly as well here as it does with fox and falco's much more classic actual particle effects for the lasers and as i said before this is clearly the most distinct blaster and i don't think it sounds particularly distinct still could have been kept in the same ballpark but maybe something a bit deeper i think there was a bit more room to work with for this one fox i'm going to give beat here you know no slight to the character but it was always kind of going to be the middle of the road hold down the fort space animal falco i think gets beat here as well on paper i like a lot of what they did with him more than fox he's certainly more stylish a candidate for eightier also a couple of weird decisions made on him though and then wolf okay i think i'll give wolf a reluctant a tier i think out of the three of them this is definitely the one with the most missed potential but it's also by far the most satisfying of them to use i really like the actual animation for the particle effect certainly more memorable than fox or falco's the pose is really distinct and strong it's pretty close though honestly i think all three of the space animals in b-tier is fair okay now we can do mario pretty simple and straightforward on this one i like the faithfulness that it has to the original mario series the fireballs obviously are not nearly as powerful as they were certainly in the original super mario brothers they travel much slower and they travel at a shallower angle but they still do a great job getting the home's ears across while also working as a functional translation into a fighting game pose is pretty simple and straightforward not too much to talk about there if you look at his hand the hand gets slightly bigger when he throws the fireball out a lot of mario's moves and a lot of moves in general do this for this one in particular i don't really understand what the point of it was mario's hand is almost completely obscured by the fire certainly at full scale and speed you know here you really need to be looking for it to notice that but i guess if you got the tools to do it this was probably rigged up so the animator had to move like a single slider for this to work so you might as well fireball sounds a lot of fun clearly very little of that apart from a bit of the impact sound actually sounds anything like fire it's retro sound design that comes from the days of sound chips but i've always really admired that 8 and 16 bit sound design it's really fascinating to see what these talented people came up with with such limited options to work with the fireball itself all the way from those original mario games actually works really well they didn't go with as much of like maybe a noise approach as you'd expect to get that sizzle instead they almost seem to be more trying to get the bounce of it across it worked well there and getting its high fidelity upgrade actually works shockingly well too this feels really satisfying to land mario's legacy is obviously something nintendo is very protective of and if you look at the fireballs themselves you can see they're not just pure balls of fire they actually have the same kind of swirl effect that they did back in the original mario games as well very cool bit of attention to detail let's be honest it's not anything particularly special it was actually an incredibly obvious choice which is why he's had it since the original smash game but i honestly think it was handled with a really masterful touch they were very careful with this one you can tell then do the other fireballs with luigi and doc luigi cool way to separate the fireballs from mario i like the arc they travel in a lot it feels you know almost a little bit silly and surreal which fits luigi to a t and i think the fire particles themselves look better than mario's as you might be able to tell from my thumbnails i'm a bit of a sucker for a different colored fire one thing that i do not like about this at all is that when luigi does connect with the green fire it then translates back into red fire for the actual impact it's kind of a cool contrast i guess but i really wish they could have made this a custom green shader rather than just using the stock default one the pose is great on this one mario often has like fairly serious looks on his face luigi doesn't get that very much in this move in particular it's almost like a here catch this kind of deal interesting touch if you look at his hand that's throwing the fireball it's kind of the shape of an l i'm not sure if they're doing that on purpose or not if they are that's a fun detail but if not like you know i could get not it's kind of just a classic throwing move but fun regardless yeah look at that fire particle animation in slow motion though it does look really good sound launching sound effect is still fun but now the impact sound is just the generic fire effect i don't really know why they did that i don't like it as much dr mario as with most of his moves is just using mario's animation the pills you know they're pills they look perfectly fine the fact that their colors change like in dr mario you can see a different color there and another one there cool detail that could have just kept it single colored so it's a nice little bit of extra effort doesn't really breed is anything particularly insane though he does get the same hand growth as mario does too which makes slightly more sense here because there's a bit less obscuring his hand particle effects on this move are honestly kind of lacking overall the actual spawn that's kind of whatever but on hit you can see that if i actually launch them out and hit chrome with it he's not getting any kind of custom particle effect he's not getting the pill breaking effect he's just getting generic impacts he uses faithful retro pale sound effects listen for it on the launch on the bounces on the ground and the impact [Music] so that's great why the visual design doesn't match it i don't really get they did that for his intro animation i think both these guys are gonna go and beat here mario's probably would have gone and beat here as well if it didn't have that really meticulous attention to detail these guys have it in large parts but they're just lacking in a few areas let's get wario in there too why not this is a really fun animation i love his pose when he's got his mouth open his head gets just gigantic as jon hinges like a snake his arms are just poking out behind him like nothing else in this world matters apart from getting someone's head in his mouth even the chomp down feels good if you don't connect it with anything of course if you do how is this so funny it's a horrifying thing that he's doing it to people here but it's so great at the same time the fact that they made it heal you in ultimate only adds to that he's literally like feasting on someone's soul part of me almost wants to say that i wish the feet sticking out of his mouth there maybe reacted just a little bit more realistically but at the same time it's almost funnier if they're just kind of stiffly awkwardly poking out there so i think i'm actually okay with that i also think the weakest part of this animation is when he's actually got them in his mouth i wish that when he was biting down his mouth opened up maybe a little bit more or he moved his head a little bit more or he shook them around a little bit more just like to make it a bit more impactful at proper scale and speed it doesn't look bad in wario even though he's not as jerky as he used to be back in like the brawl days certainly he still got a bit of that intentional jerkiness to him so i think it works okay in context i wish that kind of just dull thud was more of an actual you know chomping noise i want to point out the actual biting mechanics too so for small characters like pichu he actually just puts the entire thing in his mouth and scales them down a bit to fit this is a good frame to show it off you can see pichu is actually scaled down pretty heavily here and then for really big characters things get pretty extreme this is bowser you can see that basically his entire body needed to be dramatically scaled down that's the approach they take with everyone to fit in wario's mouth different characters that different parts of their bodies scale down and sometimes the results are a bit more extreme than others technically i guess it would probably make a bit more sense for the larger characters to maybe have some kind of like gut expanding animation for wario or you know have his jaw hinge more but in practice i think this works out perfectly fine it's not really something that you tend to question that much and wario is a comedic character to begin with so his mouth just being this endless void that can swallow up everything okay sure sound design with this one is a flaw and a pretty substantial flaw but it's still just an absolutely hilarious animation i think it earns zestier basically just from that kid icarus palutena pit dark pit so everything about this functionally is pretty good i like that there's an indicator showing that you have been locked on two but there's not a great indicator for where the lock-on range actually is there kind of is like you can see the flashing light that has a bit of an edge to it but at speed certainly if there's like multiple players in the game and explosions going off and people moving around it's really hard to lock down where the actual edge of the targeting range is okay so there you can see the light is actually reaching corn a little bit so this to me says there should be targeting going on here still not okay at this point corrin is clearly fully engulfed there we go so that was right on the edge as the idle animation shifted him into it that is admittedly a bit more of a flaw with the fundamental design of the move but the animation could certainly have been doing more to compensate with that after you do lock on i like how snappy the targeting reticule is that comes on pretty quickly you know very simple graphic but nothing wrong with it it also doesn't fully indicate where the shots are going to be locking on two though so you can see like i'll fire it here that's the spot but you can clearly see they're not actually firing at the center of the reticule they're still tracking core in to some extent again a bit more of a gameplay element than a purely animation element there's clearly some leeway being made to help with better tracking for gameplay purposes but the bottom line is the reticule is still an animation thing and it's still not accurately conveying what the move is actually going to be doing the firing animation for palutena is nice good strong pose i like the continued continuity with the halo for all of her more goddess power style moves and does clips through the shield a little bit that's a bit of an oversight but honestly smash and even video games in general are full of this kind of stuff it's not really fair to ask the artist to account for this every single time not really a big deal particle effect looks good i like the animation on the staff as well and then while connecting it can be a bit unreliable when you do connect it i think it feels nice i like this kind of kid across sound design much more than the swishy sword attacks pit magic bow where you can control the arrows the arrows themselves look pretty good and they have a very nice sense of flow to them i talked last time about pip being able to separate and conjoin his swords in his idol stance so you can see they're apart they're together they're apart they're together so the animations need to account for that smartly handle for this one you can see his swords are apart right now but the animation has him draw his hands together extremely quickly but in a way that doesn't actually look unnatural at all i think there might even be literally frame one okay so here's the zyto stance yeah literally the very first frame he puts the bow together but it doesn't feel jarring at all another cool detail in slow motion here so look at the rings on his arm watch what happens to them as he starts drawing the bow [Music] that's cool they actually get transferred onto the arrow itself there's a bit of a jumpiness in there though you can see it here yeah like that looks a little bit weird do it again yeah so i think what's going on is if you fire the bow without charging it at all yeah there's no jumpiness whatsoever it kind of just goes straight into it but he's got probably a separate charging animation so you end up in that kind of slightly awkward looking thing now i am interpolating frames here at quarter speed let's do frame by frame so interpolating frames essentially what that means just using his jab as an example here's every frame of the animation at full speed right so that's what it looks like that's just happening much faster to the point where 60 of them are happening per second now let's say i'm running it at quarter speed though right so from here to here rather than that taking 1 60th of a second it now takes 4 60th of a second so what does the game do it has to fill those in with new frames which are gonna be frames the animators didn't necessarily account for and didn't necessarily need to be expected to account for i'll probably put an edit in here to show what's happening at quarter speed with that one so at quarter speed yeah this looks jumpy what does it look like at full speed doesn't really look jumpy anymore so that may be an interpolation thing but even if it's not an interpolation thing and there is one kind of jumpy frame not actually an issue because when you're using the move the way it's intended to it looks perfectly fine his stance is actually not too far off from an actual archery stance here you do put your fingers up to the corner of your mouth like that obviously with a real bow they're going to be curved in a way that they're not curved here but who cares it's an energy arrow who's to say how he's supposed to be holding up shooting the bow yeah that kind of sucks um i do not like a lot of kidaker as the sound design the bow swishiness is among the worst it gets for me and it's part of the reason why i do not main pit i mean dark pit okay that's clearly not the entire reason but certainly the fact that the arrows feel so much heftier helps a lot i think that all feels way better with dark pit which makes sense because they're the more powerful impactful damaging arrows at the cost of control but i think they went a bit too far with pit he still feels pretty weak whereas dark pit feels just about right animation itself is obviously the same the main differences are that dark pit doesn't have the nice ring animation that pit gets but i also think i like the particle effect of his arrow a little bit more it's a bit more distinct and memorable to me when it's traveling as well it has a more distinctive trail behind it palutena i think i'm going with c tier the concept itself is fine the execution as well even if they're nothing incredibly memorable but it's got a couple of minor so i think they're gameplay going to go beat here they're perfectly acceptable simon and richter this has some weight behind it you feel this one in your bones when you fire it out or get hit by it yeah look at how much he winds up into this thing the throwing arc itself i'm gonna say is a little bit weak right at the end it starts off really strong but then it ends up looking a bit more like a push i think that may be a reference to the castlevania animations but this is one of those things i don't think it's so iconic that you couldn't translate it a little more faithfully into a modern 3d assuming that's even what they're going for i'm not 100 sure on that yeah you can see what i'm talking about here it looks like it's going to be a powerful wind up but then his arm just kind of ends up moving a bit more forward rather than following a natural arc up you notice that a little bit in gameplay conditions but honestly it's not that big a deal the axe itself is clearly way too big good and it means that when you're throwing it through the air like you can feel the damage that's gonna do tangibly and this is reinforced by just having a boatload of hit lag look how long richter is stuck in place there before he gets launched actually has a little bit of gameplay functionality too because it allows you to connect a few more combos than you normally be able to stuff like that a lot of moves have the luxury of using electrical particle effects or something along those lines to imply why the character is stuck in place for so long this move can't do that but you don't really find yourself questioning that at all because what extra hit like translates into in a platform fighter is a feeling of more power and no one is questioning the power of this attack and then the sound so the sound of it arcing through the air is fantastic that whoosh i'm gonna say this is maybe a caliber a move that would have warranted a slightly beefier hit sound overall though i think just the powerful sound of the axe flight itself is still enough to get the point across yeah s tier for simon and richter they feel so good to use let's do the clone gang marth lucina roichrom the shield breaker feels pretty good to use obviously feels better when you charge it up but even then it's not nearly the most powerful feeling of these kinds of charge moves despite how devastating it is it's actually a very powerful move obviously you can break shields with it but it's a pretty early kill move even without that aspect if you charge it i think there are a couple of reasons for that he's not actually stepping forward if you notice his feet just kind of slide around on the ground and even at the beginning when he's starting to charge it up he sinks into the position a little bit but he's not like really setting up for it that well and then at the end his front foot really should be going forward to sort of emphasize the attack rapier fighting which is how martha's supposed to be portrayed that's absolutely what they do and then the other thing is his back hand it's not really fully counterbalancing that's because he's not stepping forward enough to really need the counterbalance but you see what i mean it's not fully stretched out behind him he's kind of doing the rapier stance thing but he's not fully committing to it i think this one works a bit better when it's angled down because then the pose that he's doing at least makes a bit more sense with the lack of a step forward and the arm angled a bit more upwards likewise serves as a better counterbalance when he's doing it upwards yeah i think that's the worst of all of them his shoulders are completely out of alignment there his right arm and his left leg are following at least a bit of a cohesive line but his left arm isn't really joining in on that and then the sound design [Music] when you don't hit someone with it it still sounds pretty good it's got two distinctive sound effects for the uncharged versus the charged version at the end both of which sound pretty piercing which makes sense considering the context of the move it's a rapier move that breaks shield so you can't get much more piercing than that and then on hit [Music] same thing it still sounds piercing but it's also got that regnal sound design which i incorrectly called the critical hit sound design last time which feels very satisfying to land this move does feel good to connect with it's just missing a bit of something when you don't okay this is something i've never actually noticed before marth and lucina have slightly different animations watch their back hands in particular you can see that lucina actually leans into the attack more than marth does yeah this one's interesting i'm actually gonna go frame by frame through this so here they both start up and almost immediately you can see they don't do quite the same chamber pose marth is doing more what you'd expect whereas lucina she reels way further back after a bit more of a startup now they end up in roughly the same position but even here her sword is held noticeably higher than marth says and then they connect more or less no hers is actually way above her head at this point i wonder why they did that because it doesn't even really read like this at full speed necessarily but yeah even here the stances are very different marth has much more of a like chest towards the ground stands lucina has a very open stance and she's leaning into it way more i actually like her pose substantially more than i like marps yeah even here at the end the pose they end on mars i guess is supposed to be a bit more like refined and graceful but to me it just looks kind of like he doesn't have a lot of energy behind it lucina she's going into it and then the recoveries are different too lucina actually puts both hands on the sword marth never does that which i guess makes sense as a rapier user he's got a bit more of a dramatic flourish at the end too he holds the sword up very regally lucina just kind of puts it back down that's honestly interesting and i guess it means that for the rest of the series i really need to look at all of marth and lucina's animations carefully and see if there's any differences between them i have no idea if there are more moves like that or not we'll have to wait and see in terms of actual placement though marth gets a b lucina i do like hers better but it's a pretty subtle improvement i've never really noticed it that much playing the game at full speed the concept for them are just kind of sword stabs right they're flashy sword stabs they're interesting but they're not doing anything incredible roy now this one is fun to use and unlike marth he is stepping into it's not the world's smoothest step you can see when he's charging it up he already slides his foot out so he's got to be like pretty quick about it it does look a bit better when you charge it up compared to spamming it like this i think the footstep looks a little bit yeah okay what's going on there the footstep looks weak because he slides his foot out then immediately needs to pick it back up which is a bit of an awkward unnatural motion so they probably could have planned that better i love the fire all over the sword while he's charging it that just feels good flaming swords right simple pleasures in life stock particle effects look great even on the default charge if you charge it up all the way that feels really good i know you can pivot this move too if it seems pretty smooth let's look at that in slow motion yeah looks okay it's got like a bit of the video game slidiness to it but nothing too bad functional does the job in a few frames that's all it needed to do i like the sound design even before you hit someone they're using a very deep heavy explosion sound then charging it up [Applause] love everything about that the gradual build up as this charging gives you a functional indication of exactly when it's reaching full charge it sounds well balanced sounds impactful all good stuff and roy's scream that he does but his voice acting is honestly some of the best in the game and then crum and roy is the exact same animation i still like the sound design on croms and his even a little bit more functional because it has clearly defined tiers between charge levels in terms of particle effects though i think these are a significant downgrade from roy's roy has a theme he's going for right massive ball of fire chrom is kind of all over the place like you got some wind you've got some more generic energy kind of stuff you've got rocks flying out of the ground it just doesn't feel as good to hit with and it's not cohesive either if it was a giant wind blast that would be one thing but he's not really doing that the same way so krom i think is going to get a b tier alongside the others roy though i'm actually gonna bump up to eight here the massive explosion and the really cool sound design honestly makes them just more fun to mess around with compared to the others ryu and ken classic for a reason really can't go wrong with the hadouken and i'm going to include like you know the classic versions as well really they're basic fireballs but they get the job done pose is strong don't really need to tell you that though it comes directly out of street fighter and then the sound design obviously comes with a street fighter as well so just a basic token and then the input version and then shakinetsu ollie found it kind of funny that hadouken just uses a straight up punch sound that punch aspect is emphasized even more with ken where you can see that he's actually faithfully got the hand imprint moving inside the hadouken yeah be dear what do you really want from me they're fireballs the animation is obviously really iconic but it was basically just plucked directly out of street fighter they didn't really need to do a lot of interpretation here and the concept there was absolutely nothing else these characters were possibly going to get for neutral special okay captain falcon okay ness and lucas yes i will take a look at the punch so everyone obviously loves this move because it's incredibly impractical and landing it on your opponent just really means that you've outsmarted them i think not nearly enough credit is given to just how good the actual animation itself is though look at this chamber pose here right like his torso and his pelvis are facing in completely different directions he's torqued up like a spring way more than a human being should be able to bend but that's called body braking and it makes attacks more impactful he's also as with a lot of his other moves got a really clear action hero pose kind of thing going on here and it's incredibly well defined and then after this ridiculously stylized chamber animation is complete you want to see how long it takes him to get the full extension into the punch three frames massive wind up into almost an instant punch it comes out so quickly and so strong extension's a bit easier to see on this side because of the particle effects just look how much he's leaning into that his thigh is basically parallel with the ground on the topic of that particle effect it's really good you actually see its wings flare up into position like a you know very classic american intro to a movie or like a propaganda commercial or something like the eagle spreading its wings i know it's a falcon but you get what i'm saying i'm pretty sure an american stereotype is what they're going for here ultimate made things even a little bit more distinct with the blue zoom that some characters get of course the falcon punch was going to be one of the moves that got it they didn't even need this though this thing has always felt incredibly impactful through its animation and sound design alone let's actually listen to the sound design just for the hell of it that hit listen to the lower register when i do it again there's almost like a womb that you hear [Music] you'll probably need to be listening on headphones but it feels how do i even describe what the punch feels like to connect if you've played smash you know and then of course that incredibly iconic yell as well sounds a little bit weird because it's being done by a native japanese speaker trying to put on an american accent but that's part of the charm yeah i don't even think i needed to tell you this move was going in s tier but this move is going in s tier all right nest for real here they've improved his particle effects so much in ultimate they're much more faithful references to the earthbound games and just look way more interesting in general compared to you know the somewhat generic just bursts of energy they used to be in some of the older games this looks great like this looks really great slow motion this isn't anything particularly special but then when it actually comes out you see all the detail that goes into the particle effects there with the different patterns different uh orbs coming out everywhere it just has this great sense of finality afterwards especially when you combine that with nessa's very energetic pose ness isn't really a character that attacks all that much with his body he mostly uses psychic energy but he's still got a really great sense of character to his poses right he's really still joining in on the attack even if he's not directly using his limbs for it you've got two distinct phases here you've got the concentration and then you've got the payoff hang on keep it contained keep it contained okay let it go and then sound design honestly sound design is pretty bog standard again he's doing the kind of weird pk flash yell he's saying pk flash but because again it's not a native english speaker doing this i've heard people misattribute a lot of other words to this over the years too again though it's just kind of part of the fun of the move lucas has a bit more of a cohesive theme to his particle effects than nest does he uses a lot of these like hexagonal designs that's incorporated into pk freeze as well but he does that really nicely in tandem with the snowflake design right they fit really well together you can see it here right there's the hexagon but he's also got the snowflake and they fit very naturally together and then the actual explosion itself you can see some ice shards in there too and you can also see some sort of what i guess might be pseudo ice shards if you look at the more diamond shaped things yeah the particle effects for nes and lucas in general clearly got a lot of attention there's like that's just really smooth lucas's pose is great too angrier than nessus is he's doing a bit more of like a fist shake thing there when he's powering it up but the concept is still the same and the release is the same as well definitely getting some hey get off my lawn energy from the first half of this now connecting it [Music] that feels good it feels better in ultimate than it has in any previous game because the ice sends opponents sideways now you know that's gameplay functionality that's not animation but the core of it is still nice i think that both of these are going to go up in a tier they're completely carried by their particle effects but those are some great particle effects pyra and mithra their special attacks are the only really distinctive moves between them flame nova honestly looks pretty good it definitely gains something if you charge it compared to not charging it because if you charge it you get to see more of the chamber pose and the sword gets more spinning and you also get to see more of that like i don't know controlling animation i guess that pyro is doing so without the charge still honestly kind of an interesting concept i like the floating sword thing but it's not really you know too memorable but when you really charge it up that's a good strong chamber animation even though she's not physically touching the sword and you can see it really flies around with quite a bit of force and then that very ending um stamp that she does too lifting herself up then boom she really slams down it's actually pretty fun to hit people with this thing again much more if you charge it though and then mithras lightning buster so that's the uncharged and then charged she gets an extra hit on it and it's a much bigger hit which you know makes sense for a charged move and i also really like the chamber pose that chamber is actually a hitbox too yeah you can see it there it's cool that's a neat concept for a charge animation to have i will say it's got a bit of an issue with it though because mithra her sword you can see is normally in this closed state but when she attacks it opens up into the three-prong thing that's great that's a cool concept the problem is though it happens with chamber animations or charge-up animations for other moves in her kit as well and this is not an active hitbox at the moment until the actual attack comes out so the visual indication that this would be a hitbox is lacking a little bit what would have probably made more sense is for her other moves to not have the actual blade come out until it's an attack it's not really that big a deal but visual clarity and cohesion is always something i'm going to praise and it's lacking just a little bit here if you look at this attack in full speed it looks pretty seamless but if you look at it in slow motion you can see there's actually two different directions involved she goes one way and then completely stops and goes back the other way it could look kind of awkward for her to abruptly stop and go back the other way but they've handled it in a way that it actually still feels pretty solidly put together one thing that i regret not praising cloud for in the last episode is if you look at it in slow motion he's clearly doing a bunch of different stuff but if you look at it at full speed it kind of comes across as just him sort of shifting his body in one arc forward mithra has kind of a similar thing going on here there's more to this attack than meets the eye at full speed but that doesn't mean that it looks messy at full speed then if you charge it up to there's even a bit more going on and then in slow motion really strong stance at the end though though honestly strong poses all throughout the entire thing i like the snappy sounds i've gone with when she's not hitting someone and then they get gradually heavier as the move progresses and the blade gets bigger and then on contact [Music] sounds fine i gotta say though i do like her more custom sound design that she has for some sort attacks so i wish there was a bit more of that in there pyrrha i think is gonna get an eight here it's not nearly as heavy feeling as some of these charge up moves that's kind of a problem that a lot of multi-hit moves have but a lot of it still does feel pretty snappy and like reasonably impactful mithra actually i think goes in aid here as well the sense of flow behind this one is really good there are some issues with it i pointed out which makes me a bit hesitant on this one but i think it's pros really outweighs cons pokemon trainer squirtle the way he gathers the water in his cheeks is kind of cool you know it just kind of bulges them out like a squirrel you can see it there i'm gonna say it's lacking a little bit of potential charm like one detail that the comments pointed out last time that i actually missed with this forward smash is that he's actually holding his mouth closed so the water doesn't come bursting out which is fun part of the reason i didn't pick up on that is because the move i more associates with squirtle like gathering water is neutral special and he's not doing that so you know i feel like they could have made that a little bit more exaggerated the weird kind of over-the-shoulder thing i don't really get right like his cheeks are funny most of the other stuff about this pose doesn't really look like much of anything to me the act of spraying too he just kind of goes back into that pose for a second the water spray itself does look good though he leans into it fairly well and there's a bit of pushback on him they can only do so much with the animation though i think aesthetically this attack would look a lot better if you really got pushed back by it but now you're getting into more gameplay details sound design yeah like that's again a pretty simple sound that's not really doing much i love squirtle's voice acting that's about the only thing you can really say about this ivysaur the bullet seed i will say i hate the concept for this move i think this was cursed from the start but if that's what the animators had to work with they put their all into it you've got the spore particle effects there you've got the spinning leaves you've got the bulb really making it look like it's firing hard look at it in slow motion even a little bit of wind up into the move looks good like it's a fantastically animated concept it's just a shame that the concept was garbage from the beginning the finish is strong too look at ivysaur's body as it kind of stamps into the ground at the end here which helps hoist the bulb up to deliver the final finisher hit because this move does have a finisher so like it even kind of avoids some of the multi-hit problem by having a very clearly defined finishing point i can't say enough good things about the actual animation of this move it's just i hate bullet seed i'm gonna say it sounds like a little bit whooshy and thin but it doesn't need to sound you know obviously incredibly devastating it is using seeds rather than literal bullets charizard there's a bit of like a foot shuffle at the start of the animation so that his torso is facing the other side i'm not totally sure what's up with that what the necessity of it is i guess maybe just to make it look like he's prepping a bit more it's not like a problem it's just a bit of extra work for the animator that i don't fully understand the need for but yeah whatever fire itself looks great smash as usual is not gonna whiff on these kinds of particle effects essentially ever there is one thing that kind of bothers me about this move though so it's got controllable uh directionality for the fire but the only thing that's really moving with it is his head like you see the rest of his body basically stays perfectly static and in place it's really just his head and a little bit of his neck that's following the angle there may be some kind of gameplay purpose to an extent keeping the hitboxes consistent but the end result is still something that looks just a little bit unnatural it's not awful but it is a part of the move you actually use on a regular basis so you can't say it's not a knock against it either sound design [Music] like it doesn't sound bad but pretty ordinary squirtle i think is gonna go down to seat here it's just it's not a very memorable move and they could have easily made it a lot more memorable squirtle in general is a very expressive character and very little of that expressiveness is coming through i find the charge up a little bit weird once his mouth is full of water there's no real visual indication that that's happened just kind of ivysaur i think gets bumped up to b-tier i hate the way they used bullet seed in this game i think the design makes no sense it resulted in a terrible move that was always gonna be a terrible move but the animators are really trying to make it work and then charizard i think is gonna join squirtle down in c tier it's got what i consider to be maybe you know a little bit of a technical flub and the concept itself is nothing particularly noteworthy especially when there's a more well executed version of that concept that we're about to look at stance isn't particularly strong again this is just kind of in the category of they could have done a bit more with it okay bowser i think this take on the fire breath attack is honestly much stronger than charizard i like his pose way more that real classic villain pose and while his head is still kind of doing the same in a vacuum thing his body isn't really following what the rest of him is doing because his neck is so much shorter it's nowhere near as noticeable an issue like not even close the fire is more satisfying and substantial to connect with too because it's so much thicker now you can't really blame them for that i think what's going on is charizard's fire is probably a reference to some of the flamethrower sprites in pokemon which often are actually relatively thin but the end result is bowser still just looks more appealing and threatening and there's no awkward shimmy here in fact he actually stomps into the attack to sell its power more and again i love that stance sound yeah sounds about the same bowser has some decent vocal cries so i think it's kind of a shame that none of them are used here instead there's not really much of anything not saying this is the world's greatest animation but i do think it feels substantially better than charizard so it's to go up to b-tier yoshi i love the really loose feel that this animation has his head just kind of bobs all over the place doesn't really worry about it too much same with his arms if you look at it in slow motion his arms just kind of hang down casually while his tongue's out he's not worried about it too much he could get you he could not get you all the same to him and then when you connect with it he does the egg spit thing there's a really hilariously exaggerated couple of frames in there that you don't really pick up on that much when you're watching it at speed this is a command grab you're forced to spit them back out immediately but you can see like he really distends so far while they're in him it looks pretty ridiculous but because it happens so quickly oh you can even see like see them passing through his body i don't want to think too much about the mechanics of how someone gets spat out yoshi as an egg but they started his head and you can see them sort of go through and distend them gross but i like it the egg wiggle is just a bit of extra charm and then the sound it's great i have nothing to complain about with the sound design there at all yeah yoshi yes dear this one's a classic sonic so sonic leans on the blue ball form significantly too much in his moveset i think that's a pretty unanimous consensus among smash players by now that said the homing attack that is one that did absolutely need to be included so i'm not gonna hold that against him here neutral special makes as much sense as anything the targeting ridicule is kind of a cool detail he doesn't really bounce off his opponent with a lot of style though like in the sonic games of 3d sonic games the homing attack is a staple and he often can use it to change together some pretty entertaining sequences in part because of how nice the animation is after he connects here he gets none of that right he just kind of bounces off charmlessly in a ball honestly sonic is not very well animated even outside the blue ball form issue a lot of his stuff is just kind of characterless and when you're taking an aspect from his home series that absolutely did have a lot of charm and care in it and just stripping all of that away it's kind of hard for me to praise you get a slight hint of the charm if the attack misses then there's a bit of like you know a stylish bounce and that's about it and then the sound it uses that horrible ear splitting sound effect that i know is canonically from sonic and it wouldn't bother me so much except for that having it and that having it like you hear these ultra high piercing sounds just constantly whenever you're playing against sonic and it really starts to get to you this is the video's first theft here the main thing driving that is the lack of charm after you hit an opponent but honestly there's a lot of stuff stacked against it they did a pretty important attack really dirty here dk crew diddy kong and king k rule 2. so dk himself now it may just be a punch but that is the beefiest punch you are ever gonna throw out this side of the falcon punch and there's so many cool little details in here too i love the electrical effect on his fist while he's winding it up you can see that his expression changes too right now he's got the punch and he looks super pissed he throws the punch out and it disappears and it goes back to the sort of more smug monkey i think his face even changes color a little bit while the punch is active so you can see look at his brow it's kind of really red and angry throws the punch out that's gone just the charge up is so well done it's got a real sense of inevitable momentum his shoulders and his hips and everything are really rocking along into it then the actual punch itself looks really good and so does his face [Music] and then connecting it yeah i love all of that dk easiest here this thing feels great it's hard for basic melee attacks to make their way up this high but if something was it's definitely going to be giant punch diddy kong fairly simple but i really like the smoke rings that come out with the peanuts and i also like the way they move they've got like kind of a bounce to them it's fun that he's a very bouncy feeling character in general so it seems appropriate firing animation it's not a particularly powerful projectile but there's still a great sense of recoil here the gun really kicks back and diddy's actually blown off one of his feet you can see he's really rocking back to keep it contained there actually a bit of a flourish when he pulls the peanut pop gun out too that's really hard to pick up on at full speed but you know cool little touch i like that and then when he's charging the gun up there's this increased sense of franticness and anger and maniacal energy up until the moment where it all blows up in his face and then when it's reaching full charge he actually needs to hold his hat on because he's vibrating so much now i wish that happened slightly earlier in the animation you can see at full speed it only really happens right before it blows up which means you're almost never actually gonna see this in a real game the sound behind it it sounds alright it's called the peanut pop gun though you know what i mean in my head i always picture there being a bit more of an actual pop sound to it did he i think manages to work his way into a tier the move isn't nearly as funny as i'd hoped for it to be but it's still pretty funny and then king k rool this one is just great everything from the faithful cannonball trajectory to the way he puts the pirate hat on and then just in a very graceful sweep puts the crown back on his head i love that vacuum form is great when he fires it out and he gets like this mischievous grin on his face when he's doing that he gets a couple different throw animations when he sucks someone in forward those look great too backward up the blunderbuss has this spectacular cartoonish to it you see it warps in a way that it absolutely should not be able to do like that's ridiculous in all the right ways and you absolutely do pick up on it at full speed the animation i've been pulling the blender bus out is really nice he steps into it satisfyingly and it looks almost a little bit too small for him right but that's like part of the appeal the sound design in general is pretty straightforward but if you actually suck something up into the blunderbuss and spit it back out i love that ridiculous sound effect there that sound effect is fine but it's nowhere near as good as what the other throws get i think king k rool actually manages to work his way into ester if nothing else because it's a crocodile wearing a pirate hat face climbers the ice climbers cheat with every single one of their moves okay the fact that there's two of them means that their attacks are automatically more interesting than they really should be having said that i've honestly always kind of liked this one it's a very low impact projectile in fact the entire thing feels kind of floaty and easy but that sort of reflects the ice climbers design in general iceberg itself looks good nice texture work nice simple model concept behind this one's pretty fun too you can see they actually raise their hammers in anticipation then spawn the icebergs out of the ground and launch them at their opponent like they're swinging at a baseball sound design is very bare bones [Music] and it feels a lot better when there are two of them as happens a lot with the ice climbers i've always had a bit of a soft spot for this one but at the same time you know got to acknowledge at the end of the day it's a pretty straightforward projectile mr game and watch obviously this is an incredibly simple character with incredibly simple animations they're a ground total of two frames in this one not counting the food that said i like it anyways here if you really really needed to see this one in slow motion here you go now you never have to see it again i think it's one of my preferred sprites that he turns into and the concept is really inventive i like the actual little detail of having multiple different types of food come out of the pan i also appreciate that they did make it a fire attack they gave the food some surprisingly hefty sound effects considering how annoying this thing can be to get hit by that actually works okay for me i'm not gonna really say it matches their velocities at all they're barely even moving but when you're at the ledge being hit by this over and over you feel those impacts i have a feeling game and watch is consistently going to be a bit of a problem to rank in these videos but one of the factors i use is how memorable a move is and honestly this is a pretty memorable and creative way to incorporate his um canon kit into his smash appearance it's got some cool little details on it you know what honestly i think this is an a tier neutral special part of me wants to say that's a massive disservice to all of the animators who had to work on the characters below this but i like game watches chef i guess we can follow this simple one up with a bit more of a complicated one here snake's grenade a lot of the stuff with this one is pretty straightforward i do want to say though i really appreciate giving snake a very distinctive pose to make it unambiguous that he absolutely does have a grenade in his hand the animation they chose actually had some gameplay implications as well because the side he holds the grenade on actually alters how easy it is to hit him without hitting the grenade and blowing yourself up to a decent little pin pull on it too nothing spectacular but they didn't really need to do that he could have just spawned it in his hand so nice bit of attention to detail there gets a few unique throwing animations as well they're not all just variants of the same one close range toss is kind of an underhand thing neutral one and then the tilted away one another cool bit of attention to detail that is just pure flourish they absolutely did not need to do this if snake has a grenade go off near him he covers his ears that's great how far away does that last for okay so it's actually a pretty decent proximity [Music] so that's about max range there you know pretty good for respecting an explosion helps pin him as the demolitions expert he's the one who knows how much that hurts snake i think is also going to get nate here they had to make a lot of considerations with regard to how his animations were going to affect gameplay here and i think they did a really good job and again that covering his ears animation is just pure polish cloud blade beam you know pretty simple and straightforward projectile the projectile does have two variants the one that travels along the ground and the one that travels through the air and the sword itself does have a decent bit of weight behind it when he's throwing the sword out you can see here there's a bit of resistance as he drags his sword along or functionally through the ground that's a nice little touch in the air he obviously doesn't have to do the drag along the ground but he still does essentially the exact same animation and i'm going to say it looks a little bit better on the ground especially because the smoke and the additional particle effects kind of help hide the blade beams after images that move back behind him which they don't look awful but they look a little bit weird in the air it's much more prominent because there's nothing else for them to hide behind like yeah that looks not incredible how does it read at full gameplay conditions yeah the weird after image that moves backwards a little bit as it travels and breaks up his silhouette a bit from this side doesn't happen at all on this side because the sword beam is off on one side of cloud's body so i think in the air it reads way better on this side than it does here sound design is actually a little bit different between them as well so here it is on the ground and here it is in the air in the air you must get a little bit more of a mechanical ping sound to it i think it may be there in both sound effects there's just less noise getting in the way if it's done in the air or it could be pitched down a bit or some kind of slightly different sound effect in the grounded version but in either case just kind of an interesting distinction i don't think one of them sounds significantly better than the other b tier solid projectile move decent enough concept nothing to get too worked up about sephiroth sephiroth has three different variants of this he's got the flare he's got the mega flare and he's got the gigaflare and all of them look absolutely fantastic there's so much detail on all of these here's flare by far the simplest but you can still see the different layers in there do megaflower next really like that transition and i also really like even just the ball itself and then once it goes off look at all of the detail you see those blade shapes you see lots of different fire in different colors you see energy blasts then gigaflare and also look at sephiroth's different hand positions it starts off fairly simple then he sort of waves it up and then at the very top it turns into the full thing plus obnoxiously slow demo of the hand poses so he starts out with his palm up you know a pretty typical summoning energy kind of pose then he does a villainous hand twirl as he continues to build in power and then when it's at maximum power he puts it all the way above his head so typical twirl all the way up sephiroth has such good animations across the board and this has to be one of the highlights actually has a different throwing animation for the different charge stages as well so here's flare you know pretty typical kind of casual hand wave mega flare like more effort put into it almost a bit of like an underhanded bowling ball kind of throw i guess is what you'd call it and then gigaflare really putting his all into it here's where his hand goes for flair here's where his hand goes for gigaflare cancelling animations for the first two stages are actually handled pretty smooth too so canceling flair and canceling megaflare simple stuff but i like to appreciate these kinds of fine details too animation is hard that's great and there's a little moment of silence you know that we've reached the point of no return brace yourselves moment kind of a sound design principle at least a little bit similar to say the seismic charge in star wars if you know that one so yeah sephiroth he's going up a nest here this one is honestly just fantastic good morning these things take so much longer to film than you'd expect or i expected when i started making them right first order of business luke is going up to s tier how to change your heart second off might as well do the me's i've been dreading them this whole time so what i think i'm gonna do for the mies is give an average rating of all of their neutral specials starting off with the shot put this one has some nice half to it i've always found this one pretty satisfying to use the arc of the shot is satisfying feels very convincing when it lands actually shakes the camera a little bit when it hits the ground that's a really cool little detail going in slow-mo so the shot put just kind of appears out of absolutely nowhere not that big a deal honestly but the actual throw animation itself again looks really convincing to me there's a very nice line of action there and then hitting it feels good too i'm gonna say compared to some other moves like i think the most obvious comparison is simon's axe the rushing sound of the shot put through the air is significantly less enjoyable to me i don't know there's just something about this that feels not limp it doesn't sound bad it doesn't sound particularly faithful i guess like it feels like a bit of a misplaced sound not hugely out of place though and not bad overall flashing lock punch the non-hit animation obviously isn't a whole lot of anything yeah just kind of like you know some relatively simple punches but it does at least convey what the move is going for fairly well and it does make the whiff state very clear on impact pretty basic just group of punches it is kind of a cool concept him sort of continuously lifting his opponent into the air and then firing them up at the very top though not an earth-shattering concept but it is kind of neat and it does certainly fit into the brawler sort of you know general martial artist kind of design stand for this one i get that that's kind of a pretty standard punch design for that rapid hit but this is a fairly strong move like it kills reasonably early so 80 on pichu i'm pretty sure this should kill easily and like that's this move's rule right it's a really big strong move and it doesn't necessarily sound like it flurry hits are somewhat forgivable but the final blow really should have more punch behind it and then exploding sidekick i know it's kind of supposed to be you know more practical falcon punch so it does get away with being a bit less stylish but man is it a lot less stylish than the falcon punch is in every way from a technical perspective it's well done good strong pose very snappy animation very long wind up but then it comes out quickly the pivot looks perfectly fine actually i would say the pivot even looks pretty smooth you can see it here like that's actually a pretty natural looking spin on the ball of his foot so from a technical perspective no real complaints it's just such a dull concept i get it he's a me his moves are supposed to be kind of dull and generic but this really does go the extra mile does feel pretty good to connect with so i will give it that and i realized i never showed off the flashing mock punch in slow motion so here's that for anyone interested just lots and lots of punches he does track the character he's raising into the air pretty well though so credit where credit's due there i think that all averages out pretty comfortably to be swordfighter the concept behind this one is cool if nothing else you know launching a tornado at your opponent that's fun in terms of the animation itself not bad you can see he does a couple of spins in place there so it looks like he's gathering the wind around him i'll show it in slow motion spin one spin two and then he fires it out so something that makes the move you know just take that extra bit of effort to animate but the payoff is that it more cleanly ties into the concept behind it that's nice particle effect is kind of whatever this standard wind lines a lot of characters actually use that kind of stuff in their moves it doesn't look bad though and then the sand for this one it's kind of whatever the wind rushing sound is nice you know the rest of it's pretty much what you'd expect sure kin of light this is the move that made me originally kind of interested in playing the story fighter it's a shame that it really doesn't have much of a place in this kit when chakram in the side special slot exists which is essentially just an objectively better version of this gameplay aside i've always liked the animation behind this one it makes you feel very sneaky which you know is appropriate for a ninja weapon simple animation but smooth strong pose very distinct when he's about to throw the move which is important again for gameplay purposes because you need to be telegraphing these kind of projectiles to your opponent if possible here it is in slow motion you can see the shurikens actually come into his hand with a bit of momentum they sort of spin on his fingertip it's a bit sloppily done it's actually clipping through his hand quite badly instead of you know one finger smoothly going into the hole in the center of the shuriken but whatever at scale this does not show up at all and then there's something about these projectiles that gradually build speed as they move along that i've always found intensely satisfying to use i really like how this one handles the particle effect for the shirt in itself is pretty cool too sound design the sound design of the shuriken flight itself is a bit interesting kind of a high pitched and pingy which i guess is appropriate for a light based weapon i feel like it could be i don't know a little more jangly sparkly celestial i don't know what you want to call it this sounds almost a bit sci-fi-ish to me and then blurring blade another one of these oh i'm a powerful move that kind of i guess shows off what the essence of the character is supposed to be i think this one does a pretty poor job though me swordfighter yeah flurry multi-hit kind of stuff is kind of what the character is about i suppose but this really doesn't look like a lot of what else he's doing it does not feel particularly inspired at all even compared to something like the flashing mock punch i think this one has significantly less personality behind it i'm a sucker for flaming swords but you can't just slap fire on a sword and expect me to forgive everything else yeah it's just so so generic and straightforward and the final hit doesn't even have that much energy behind it look at the pose he ends up in the tip of the sword is almost straight up that is not someone who's really thrown his entire weight behind making that thing move back as far as possible it looks way too controlled for the kind of you know ultra powerful chaotic finisher they're going for here connecting with it doesn't even feel that good to connect it does 14 why does it do 14 i get that's a gameplay thing but why does this move exist what a waste of a special move slot i hate it my best bet is that this was at least a little bit of like a marth parallel with dancing blade because generally speaking the character is far more based on link weirdly enough which is kind of a weird decision in the first place but of all the places you could put a marth reference in it you know it couldn't be his iconic moves like forward air shield breaker b again for this one i really do like the other two projectiles especially the shuriken of light if blurring blade didn't exist i'd be considering a tier but blurring blade alone is an easy f tier for me so i think balancing it out was b swear me gunners charge blast that's the charge shot like even by the standards of the me's which are very obviously supposed to allude to existing characters on the roster me gunner has some pretty blatant ones and this has got to be up there at the most boldfaced that said you know in isolation it doesn't look that bad the charge animation itself is fine it is a little bit weird how far away the actual projectile spawns away from the barrel of the gun though nice sense of recoil on the shot itself though it does feel convincing to land slow motion charge up and fire yeah i mean again it's just charge shot but it's fine sound design i actually do like that charge up sound and then impact i like the firing sound too the sad design on this is pretty good and then the small hits [Music] again surprisingly satisfying laser blaze once again fairly blatant nod to kind of uh falco wolf hybrid sort of thing looks alright i do like the particle effect of the beam itself fairly distinctive and it does convey what it's going for fairly effectively like okay this is a laser blast like the space animals you're familiar with but it is certainly gonna hit harder simple but effective green goes very well with the me gunner default costume it's nice complementary coloring firing animation very nice has some good kickback on the gun me gutter's gun actually doesn't have nearly as much interesting detail on it as some characters get you can see it's not really animated whatsoever i guess they're just too many moves they needed to try and stick on there but i feel like they could have done a bit more with it show it in slow motion here the gun kick once again perfectly fine but there are no flaps opening there's nothing spinning there's no steam discharging anywhere not that necessarily matters all that much at full game speed but it's maybe a little bit of a cut corner sound sound is certainly very interesting for this one they made a lot of effort to distinguish it from the other space animals it's got a metallic twang to it there might be some literal like filtered metal hits mixed into the sound for that or they could be using frequency shifting or ring modulation fm synthesis there's a lot of ways to get that metallic sound so conceptually interesting to think about does that mean i actually like it no not really honestly it sounds very thin like considering how powerful this laser is supposed to be i think it's missing way too much bass in mid-range and the hit sound itself is where the more classic laser ping comes in which i think just feels a little bit weird and unsatisfying relatively powerful laser hit this should be something chunkier in my opinion and then the grenade launch once again the firing animation is pretty satisfying on this one that's one thing that they seem to have really nailed with this character i like the arc the grenades travel in into they hit the ground and rather than bouncing everywhere they stop fairly abruptly it obviously has a lot of gameplay implication but from an animation perspective it makes them feel very heavy and substantive considering this is one of the more i guess realistic and grounded moves on the character's kit probably taking some inspiration from snake that seems very up its alley yeah nice strong pose that again conveys what the animation is actually doing decent recoil on it too tiny bit of animation with some glow at the front of the barrel but again nothing really much more than that sound firing sound is cool actually very much a classic fire in the hole sort of deal actually really like that i think i can get away with a tier for this one yet charge blast is a little bit of a letdown in the conceptual sense but it's still technically handled fairly well maybe the only thing that's putting me off a bit is the floating orb thing but other than that it's pretty good and the physics on these feel great the main thing i think that's bumping it up to a tier for me is just how satisfying it feels to launch the grenade and there's not really much that's hugely bringing any of these down for me either might as well do the samus comparisons while it's fresh on my mind here so samus's charge shot the og definitely handled better than me gunner's charge blast you can see that the actual positioning of the charge feels way more where you'd expect it to be there's actually some really nice pushback on samus too it conveys that sense of power so well which makes sense this is an extremely powerful move and yeah the recoil on this is among the most intense that you'll find on the roster particle effect looks really good on this one too they've had plenty of games to refine it at this point watch it in slow motion you can see the different layers coming in i like those lines coming into the center really emphasizing the sort of building up nature of it multiple different layers on the edges and then that core orb in the middle still no real gun animation on the charge up but that doesn't really matter all that much because the entire gun is completely obscured by the orb anyways but then when you fire it you'll see that the gun barrel is animated you can see up there it actually is quite nicely animated except for right at the end there when it just kind of pops closed is that an interpolation thing full speed yeah i can't even tell whatever really strong distinctive pose when she's charging up too that actually applies even if she's charging in the air too as with a lot of air-to-ground animations it is a bit jarring like you'll find that a lot of characters if they're doing an aerial animation and they switch to the ground you can see her legs just kind of abruptly snap into place there that's kind of a necessity for gameplay purposes though and at actual gameplay scale and speed it's not really something that you ever tend to pick up on and then sound design yeah i really like that in particular i love how long it reverberates afterwards it really feels like a massive hot ball of energy to split the air around it which one of these you prefer comes down to personal choice i'm going to say i think i like dark samus slightly more just because it's a bit more distinct samus is kind of the character that needs to hold down that classic energy feel whereas dark samus can do something a bit different animation on dark samus gun still nothing really on the barrel charging up and then firing it yeah you can see that dark samus actually has some fairly distinct barrel splitting animation which i think looks cooler than samus's s tier for these really well handle from a technical perspective feel fantastic to use like the sound design like the posing like the particle effects nothing i take issue with here finish up the metroid squad zero suit samus and ridley seriously samus so on the ground this one feels fine pose is strong fairly distinct you can see when you're charging it up too it's got a nice bit off to it i'm gonna say the recoil is not the greatest on this one but you know it doesn't really need to be this is the paralyzer it's not an especially strong gun you can see that the uncharged hit essentially does nothing the charged hit does do something though and it's still not a great recoil animation there the other thing about this one is that in the air it looks slightly jumpy as she transitions into the charge up it's not a huge deal but you can see that doesn't look nearly as smooth as some moves do it is definitely more noticeable with a stationary screen but you can see there's just there's that tiny kind of jittery moment right at the beginning when she starts pulling the gun out particle effect for this one the standard one is nothing really to write home about the big one i do like that again very generic but it does feel good to connect i like the yellow rings that come off when you connect these show off the recoil in slow motion here with a charged version yeah it's just not that convincing sound design uncharged and then charged yeah sounds fine i guess the best thing i can say about it is that it does kind of feel appropriate for its role b i guess i'm just i'm not left with that much of an impression of anything on this one ridley's plasma breath the arc of these projectiles has always felt very satisfying to me especially when you charge it up like that plasma stream that feels intensely good to connect with the ridley animation himself pretty decent pose too i want to say they could maybe have taken it slightly further i'd love to see a bit more of a bowser thing where his claws are really splayed out you know he's really looking evil and sinister but not bad ridley's generally kind of a mixed bag for me in terms of animation i will say that i think overall this is one of his nicer ones i like the flow of the tail when he's throwing it out i like the pose that the wings make doesn't really sound like that much of anything to be honest he just kind of uses generic stock fire sound effects i think they could have done a little bit more with that i think i'll go 8 here just because i really do love that stream of plasma animation so much it feels so good to use everything about this is kind of stock and honestly i think you can make a solid argument for b tier as well but personally for me that one extra bit of fun factor is just enough to push it over the top jigglypuff not only is rollout a terrible move from a competitive perspective but it's also a terrible move from an animation perspective it is so generic that doesn't look like much of anything and it barely alludes to the pokemon games at all i get that rollout is a little bit of a generic animation in the pokemon games too it's a pretty generic move that you can slap on a lot of pokemon but my god who looked at this and decided it needed to stick around since the original game the charge up is just so whatever there's barely an expression on jigglypuff's face i guess the motion smears are kind of cool but even if you hit an opponent with it you know there's no interesting collision you just kind of jolt around the uncharged version i guess is a little bit funny nowhere near funny enough to justify everything else wrong with the move though such an easy f tier this is honestly one of my least favorite animations and moves in general in the entire game rolling up into a ball not off to the best track record so far wrap up the fire emblem gang ike isleth robin corrin x eruption it feels pretty good to press the button and have the move come out that doesn't necessarily translate to the move feeling good to connect with at lower percents and while i do appreciate the blue fire which is a reference to fire emblem i don't really like that it goes directly back to the orange fire on ganondorf when you charge the move up more though it does feel pretty good to connect with and i do like that in ultimate they gave it the different pillars that charge up there should still be a projectile don't get me wrong like ike's been able to do in every fire emblem appearance but for what we are working with like this is not bad right it's a big powerful explosion that travels a long distance it feels good pose is very strong very distinctive and he really does slam himself into the ground when he's doing it you can see that he actually completely comes off the ground at the beginning of the stab his feet have left the floor and then he buries the sword in very deep with a very strong ending pose it does feel convincing of course that has gameplay function as well because this is also ike's most reliable way to two frame opponent so you can see that the sword tip sticks well below the ledge and that is a hitbox sound design that's kind of whatever charging it it says okay i'm gonna say that compared to roy it's not nearly as satisfying to charge up which considering it's actually not nearly as powerful a move i suppose does make some amount of sense but at the end of the day you're still left with a less satisfying move to use i think this one's gonna go beat here it is kind of a bit of a candidate for a but it's not that fun to use unless you charge it and even when you do charge it it's still not nearly the heftiest feeling move the concept is also just not that great it feels i guess kind of appropriate for how ike was interpreted in smash but it doesn't actually really match fire emblem that well stylus fail not so this move sucks let's just get that out of the way immediately but for what it's worth this is an extremely satisfying arrow to connect with when you actually do manage to do it posing is extremely strong on this one and it's actually a very nice chamber into a fairly convincing arrow draw watch what the actual arrow itself does here you can see there's actually a bit of a flourish there smoothly puts it on drawn back to the corner of the mouth looks pretty good and then charging it up so here's the initial pull pretty good and then you get like that second one where she goes way further back watch it one more time here yeah and she leans even further back almost like she's just trying to put everything she possibly can into getting the arrow under control i like the particle effects on the bow and then at scale the arrow itself looks really nice as it's traveling through the air too i like how just instant the travel time is the particle effects coming off fox too it's a really satisfying move to use as it should be it's completely impractical so you want these big and practical moves to be solid when they do land and this is definitely up there it's kind of funny how the bow just barely seems to actually bend back before the final strong hit though it's mostly just the string kind of being elastic which no that's not how real bows work but you know what this is made of dragon bone so what do i know maybe the fire emblem world just works like that sand design nothing intense there but the flight of the arrow is relatively satisfying it's got that nice sort of whistling aspect to it and then charging all the way yeah i like that one a lot bileth s tier this one is honestly handled really well across the board robin you got a few different variants here you got the thunder you got the l thunder you got the ark thunder and then you have the thoron so just starting with the charge animation itself i like it using the book as the charging vessel makes total sense to me and it's a really strong pose i like the continuously escalating particle effects to indicate which version is being charged at the moment really clear indicator of thorn is in there there's not really any kind of diegetic indication of any kind of a different charge level is in there but you can really only ask so much i think that's fine different amounts of electricity crackling off the book may actually be kind of confusing so thunder l thunder and art thunder do all use the exact same firing animation which if you compare that to something like sephiroth is certainly a bit of a downgrade thunder and l thunder both fire very quickly so that's fair but arc thunder is noticeably slower and has a very different role to play you can see the difference here right between thunder and l thunder but then arc thunder very different so maybe you could ask for a different firing animation for that one specifically at least they did it with thoron because thoron is obviously very different and that one he puts a little bit more flourish into it and for what it's worth i think both animations are quite solid in their own right they do look convincing i like these energy animations where it looks like the character is still physically getting very involved with it then thoron as well and i do like the slurge of the sword too that's something he does in a few of his moves and robin's in a bit of an interesting archetype so i think having him flip his tools around like that just seems appropriate and looks cool i also like that when robin's charging the tomes up he actually puts the sword behind his body so you're really as the opponent focusing on the fact that it's atonement use right now small touch but i would imagine they likely did that on purpose you can see that as you cancel the animation the sword comes back into focus more sound design thunder health thunder arc thunder and then thoron so apart from the vocalizations as far as i can tell they're all using stock sound effects but they're appropriate sound effects you hear it gradually go up from a light push to very prominent multi-hit thud and they're all using a lot of the frequency spectrum by the standards of small harassment projectiles thunder is actually are relatively disruptive one so it makes sense that it should have a bit more oomph behind it i think this one's actually going to be another s here for me there were so many details they had to handle in this one a lot of little flourishes a lot of different gameplay aspects and i think they passed with flying colors essentially every time it's not the most insane or creative concept for a move in the entire world but it's just handled so so solidly and then finally corin with a dragon fang shot this one definitely has some intricacies behind it you've got two variants you've got the actual shot and then you've got the bite and they can both be charged separately from each other so a lot to account for i think it was pretty well done overall and this is definitely one of the most creative uses of the dragon transformation the hand turning into the mouth that's pretty metal so you can see here's everything uncharged here's everything charged just charging the bite and just charging the shot the shot animation is okay i think what really sells this move for me is definitely much more the bite that actually feels really nasty still gonna complain about how stupid the head transformation looks and frankly i'm probably gonna be doing that yes for every one of corin's moves where they transform into a dragon that aside though my other major complaint with this one would be that the silhouette is a little bit messy there's just a lot going on here especially on this side where the mouth hand is the one facing the camera so it's cutting off even a bit more of the already you know fairly messy silhouette and there's particle effects and there's all sorts of spikes flying all over the place it's just a bit much even at full speed right especially since you've also got those what are those like light gray tendrils behind the main hand i i guess you'd call them that are they cloth are they supposed to be i don't really know what they are but the things behind the actual jaw that are just waving all over the place it's a lot so not the cleanest animation on earth but you kind of forgive the messiness when you connect with that charged bite because that hits like very few other moves in the game now i will say the particle effect for the water is not that good and connecting with the actual water it really doesn't do all that much like some other moves that's a bit more of a gameplay thing ultimate does it worse than smash 4 but even when you do connect with the paralyzer unlike zero suit samus's where it really looks like it should be paralyzing this feels like it should be doing more than it actually does i will say that that element aside though there is a lot of really nice satisfying squash and stretch on the hand it's really exaggerated you can see how long the hit leg is and how much the hand distends to actually wrap around rosalina there it does feel like an animal just taking a chunk out of you sound design for the shot nothing to write homo about their sound design of the jaw you get a little bit of that roar in the background but considering this is one of cory's strongest kill moves i do think it maybe warrants a bit of a stronger sound effect i think this one's going to go innate here love the concept probably my favorite concept of any of the fire emblem characters neutral specials but again you know just a few details that bring it down for me terry terry the last of the fighting game transplants has moved set did get a bit more interpretation than something like maybe ryu and ken like his moves are obviously very recognizable between smash and king of fighters but some of them do have their rx changed fairly significantly their animations have some interesting details changed power wave in general works relatively similarly between the two of them though i do like the particle effect for it a lot in smash aerial version actually looks pretty nice in its own right too even without the wave and terry's posing too it telegraphs the projectile really well and he looks very committed to it like a lot of stuff that terry does you can see that he winds back really far and then he just slams that fist into the ground his hips really pivot hard sound design so i really spammed it there because he does have several different vocalizations but he is clearly mainly tuned to say power wave i just wanted to get them all out he's got that thing going again where he's supposed to be like you know this all-american boy and he's clearly not actually being played by an american and he's become an instant fan favorite in the voice acting department and then he's also got the thing going where it really sounds more like he's hitting you with a punch than he's hitting you with a projectile and it's a king of fighter's punch and that game has amazing sound design i think s tier for this one it's such a simple projectile but there's so much personality behind it olimar this one's a bit unfair to evaluate because i get why it looks just so flaily and kind of like a whole lot of nothing it needs to be for gameplay purposes the animation barely reads at all if you do a single pikmin plug you see what i mean like it's so quick that it's just completely weightless and then if you spam it in rapid succession it honestly gets even worse it needs to be that way but this is not a suiting the gameplay tier list really i kind of do that from time to time but it's much more just a pure animation tier list and from a pure animation perspective this barely looks like a pikmin pluck i will say that the pikmin themselves come fairly satisfyingly out of the ground but even then you know what i mean there's just there's not that sense of pop of resistance they just kind of flatly come out and then they start their relatively satisfying arcs it doesn't really feel like you're digging or reaching into the ground at all though they maybe at least had a bit more of an opportunity to do it on the whiff but even on the whiff where you think it might be intended to be more punishable it's just so quick it just almost looks like he's flying backwards rather than trying to reach into the ground to grab something it looks a bit more readable at slow speed not that particularly matters but even here right if i were to tell you that this was uh him like having his head pushed into the ground and bonking off animation if you didn't know the context you might believe me in terms of sound effects that's got a nice little bit of a pluck sound to it and i do like pikmin sound design in general so it's kind of a shame that the actual animation doesn't really match up with it i'm kind of debating between c and f tier for this one i'll put it in seat here just because i am willing to accommodate the gameplay functionality a little bit and it does some other stuff right but i really can't see going higher than that villager and isabelle with their pockets so full disclosure i make no pretense whatsoever about being a fan of animal crossing i got it from my girlfriend and i've watched her play it a bit she loved it for a time so that's kind of my entire exposure with it that said i do know how important the pocket is to the way animal crossing plays and while this is a very simple animation simple does not necessarily equal bad it does seem fairly in place with how the move works in the animal crossing series yeah so this is a whole lot of nothing really it's essentially just one static pose with his arm sticking out slightly and a relatively simple particle effect but i think considering where the character comes from that's honestly not really an issue for me the much more interesting aspect for me is how it works if you actually do pocket something it's a pretty smooth animation to actually put it away after you get it and then of course once you pull the thing out the one thing that does bother me a little bit is that every single projectile will always use the exact same animation regardless of the trajectory it's launched at so here's isabel's rocket that goes straight up and yet if i pocket it as villager it still looks like i'm throwing forward i know it would have taken a ton of effort to program the directionality aspect of every single projectile in the game into the information for villager and isabelle's pocket animations and again they're characters who can get away with this kind of thing better than a lot of the roster will so probably not worth the effort in the grand scheme of things but it is noticeable one thing i will say about animal crossing is that in its own way it has really nice sound design and that does translate over here even if you miss especially satisfying inventory opening sound i couldn't exactly articulate what makes it so good but i really do like it and if you miss it's a funny sound effect and then if you do manage to pocket one very nice little collection sound there and then of course actually using it is just the original sound effect i think gate dear for both of these i'm judging them on a very different basis than a lot of the characters that are in this tier but you know there's not a lot of substance to these moves but they're very satisfying in their own way very charming pikachu and pichu animations once again are fairly simple for these but they're effective pikachu in particular i really like the pose that they strike it really conveys the line that the actual thunderjolt is going to travel in very smoothly and there's some fairly decent telegraphing on it i will say there could be a bit more of that i think if the cheeks started glowing a little bit earlier that would be functionally nice and it would also make the animation just look that extra a little bit more polished but not bad as is peachy similar thing looks a lot angrier when they use it but i will say that because of the different body shape and the different pose i don't think this one follows the flow quite as well with the thunder jolt and the cheek glow is also a lot less noticeable than it is on pikachu here pikachu has much more defined broad travel arcs pichu is a lot tighter i think this is mostly a personal preference thing i personally find pikachu's a little bit more satisfying to use but pichu's i could understand the quickness of it being appealing feels a little bit snappier a little bit more dangerous you can see the difference in pose here in theory they're both doing very similar things it might actually be essentially the same animation between them but because the body proportions are so different it does read fairly distinctly between them you know peachy's got a way bigger head pikachu's got a more prominent tail so pikachu follows this nice satisfying line and pichu looks a little bit just kind of hunkered over it pikachu beetier i almost want to put pichu in seed here just because i really do find that pose substantially less satisfying it does create a much more muddled animation in my opinion i think realistically that's probably a bit harsh but i'm kind of tempted soraa three rotating spells i get it there was a lot for the team to do here i will say individually they're all just kind of a whole lot of nothing that's kind of the point right i'm not a kingdom hearts fan by any means but from what i understand these are supposed to be some of the most generic magic he has access to which i guess makes sense for a neutral special but they really are generic the firing pose the particle effects nothing about them really do a whole lot for me the one thing that does have a little bit more life is thondaga just because at least you know it's a summon the thunder kind of animation that certainly has more charm to it than the others in my mind sora is generally a character that's full of really charming animation this is not really that high up there for me here's the one for fyraga and blizzaga it looks like he's having fun i'll give him that i don't know it doesn't really kick that much actually it barely even kicks at all particle effects on the tip of the keyblade are kind of cool i guess but the actual fireball itself is extremely generic and then thundaga same kind of deal again that is my favorite but it's not by much sound design firaga zondaga then blizzaga i will say that the fire and thunder versions use appropriately punchy sound effects but other than that what do you really want me to say about these they're so run of the mill and the voice acting look i i know sora is a popular character i know his voice actor is very popular among the fan base but this kind of character just does not click with me at all fire thunder this is the most middle of the pack milk toast run-of-the-mill b-tier i can imagine giving there's nothing wrong with it i just feel nothing let's get the links going here kind of a weird grip link is using there is that a real grip that any actual archers use i actually don't know i've never seen it i haven't done archery in a very long time to be fair but to my eyes that doesn't really look like any technique i've ever seen again he's a fantasy character he doesn't need to do realistic real world technique it just i wonder what the creative decision behind that was because it looks pretty bizarre to my eyes maybe it's some kind of technique i'm not familiar with maybe that's what he does in zelda but it just strikes me as a bit strange definitely doing the stretchy bowstring thing but i actually don't think the final result looks bad at all in the charging pose it's fine yeah you can see a full charge here he starts pulling it back and then it actually goes way past his cheek so he's almost over drawing the bow a little bit again not very realistic but it does give it a nice sense of power there is a distinctive firing pose for the air versus the ground it starts off looking a lot more distinctive at the end of it he does still have his feet slanted a little bit more than if he's on the ground but it's not really that much so i will say i the aerial version it begins looking a little bit better than it ends you see what i mean here he largely just kind of looks like he's standing in the air if i compare that to something like samus i don't think it's nearly as good a sound design love the creakiness on the bow young link this one very much has the he's barely touching the string yet the arrow is still going absolutely flying thing this is obviously much where the state it's supposed to be used in as compared to links out of all three of them this is clearly the era that's supposed to get the most emphasis because it's a huge part of young link's neutral and combo game link gets the ability to pick it up as an item and use it as a double arrow but that's kind of a whatever sort of deal i actually completely forgot to look at that animation i will before we wrap this up but yeah even uncharged this one actually feels really snappy and satisfying to use uncharged on the ground but the bow actually recoils all the way forwards that's interesting so you can see that he fires the arrow and then it actually overshoots and wraps all the way back around sells the launch pretty well and then charging it up so he is over drying it a bit but in terms of an actual grip that's the most realistic grip i've seen on any of these uncharged sound design i really like that fun string snap and arrow flying sound then you've got that relatively punchy fire attack on the other side and again this is a major tool in young link's kit and this is the main way that you're gonna be using it you want that to feel good charging it up [Applause] again that nice creak sound effect doesn't really change there which means it still feels good and then young link actually has a bit more of a convincing aerial version as well which is good because he does a lot of jumping arrows so you can see here his legs actually dangle way more convincingly than adult links do okay as promised here's link's double arrow fires it into the ground goes and picks it up and it changes absolutely nothing i do like that the arrows are slightly staggered so they don't hit opponents at exactly the same time but am i going to change my rating one way or another because of that toon link extremely floaty by design out of the three of the links i guess it does make sense to interpret toon link is like the floaty one but my god even by his standards this is an extremely floaty move which means we kind of need to judge it on a different basis because you know it's not going to have the same kind of impact that link and young link have it's not really supposed to that's not what it's designed for firing animation is actually fairly convincing i will say his wrist is torqued to all hell here if you look at his forearm is essentially facing the camera and his wrist is bent like 90 degrees with those kind of proportions though you got to make some sacrifices somewhere he could realistically not be pulling the bow back nearly that far but i think it's fine his proportions definitely do make him look the weirdest out of the three links when he kneels down though those tiny tiny feet are not helping things beau doesn't have nearly the same snappiness it doesn't overshoot in the same way but i will say the early draw is the most convincing out of all of them like he actually goes into a reasonably full draw right away and actually the uncharged version that's actually a relatively comfortable looking stance obviously the arrow is gigantic and it wouldn't actually go anywhere but hey tune link physics looks much better for his wrist sound design swishy like you'd kind of expect from his cartoony design i will say it's mercifully less swishy than a lot of his sword sounds i said before that i think those are way too over the top this is striking a pretty good balance for me they kept some punch in the actual arrow if it does connect i do appreciate that especially when it's charging and again there's that creakiness in the bow link and tune link are gonna go in b tier young link i'm actually gonna move up to eight here this is the favorite of mine by a pretty significant margin mega man so metal blade can be thrown in a lot of different directions sometimes it makes a lot of sense and other times it really does not that is clearly not the throwing animation for launching it up from what i can see he's only got one animation for throwing it forwards and then one animation for throwing it backwards no matter what angle he chooses and i get that mega man is kind of a you know homage to the classic sort of deal he uses a lot of his very early sprite work for the inspiration for his moveset i still think this just looks a little too goofy though mega man's got a very long history behind him and i actually frankly don't really like the smash approach of oh we're gonna pick this one or two games to be the basis for a huge chunk of his moveset even if you disagree stuff like this it just looks wrong to me not the fun kind of oh i remember that sort of wrong but this kind of oh really they didn't update this it's got gameplay implications too right because if his throwing animation doesn't have variance it's way less telegraphed to your opponent like with a lot of stuff this comes down to personal preference you may be a huge classic mega man fan and think this is a great inclusion cool go make your own tier list for everything else though it looks perfectly fine and there's some good smears on the metal blade looks pretty good as it's traveling through the air sound design now that synthesized throw sound i do like that reference and the move itself feels pretty good to connect with one of the generic blade sounds but it's one of the heftier ones and the fact that you can hit with it back to back like that and it still keeps feeling good the entire way through yeah that's all fine c tier sorry this one's starting out a b tier and then how you move it from there i guess mostly depends on how you interpret that upwards throw i don't like it peach and daisy ultimate change this animation so that toad is actually stepping out to protect peach or daisy as compared to the previous games where she used him as an involuntary meat shield i'm not necessarily going to say it's as funny anymore but it does you know feel more appropriate and it also ties well into pete generally incorporating toad a lot more into her move set than she used to now peach sort of hunkering down behind toad does make a certain amount of sense she's generally portrayed as a bit less of a damsel in distress nowadays although it still very much pops up and she's video games classic damsel in distress that's a whole conversation i don't really want to get into in this video but in any case it does work for her daisy on the other hand i really don't think it does daisy's always been portrayed as way more aggressive and tomboyish and she's not really associated with toads in the same way at all i think the only reason she shares this animation is because they have to share animations they're echo fighters admittedly there are other things i'd like to be changed on daisy which are higher priorities than the toad animation but it still doesn't really fit and then of course if the camera actually connects you get that stream of spores and i do like what toad's doing there he throws the spores out really aggressively and then kind of trips over himself a little bit it's like he summoned way more power than he was necessarily prepared for sound design it doesn't sound that satisfying it's not really supposed to it's not the most powerful counter in the game by any means crying shame that there's no toad vocalization of any kind though as far as i'm concerned that is a massive oversight in the move i'm very torn on these ones i think in some ways they do things very well but there's also some stuff i kind of hate about them really don't like how daisy's stuck within an addition to peach peach i think i will go eightier because i do like the animation and it feels appropriate for her daisy actually goes in b tier even though the animation is exactly the same it does not suit her at all and it's clearly only there because of resource constraints min-min the way that quote-unquote special moves work with min-min is a little bit weird um how exactly do i interpret this you know what i won't yeah min-min i'm actually just gonna strike from the list entirely and then i guess these moves will show up in the neutral air animation tier list or the forward tilt animation to your list whenever those happen speaking of broken dlc steve this is a fun one to evaluate so you got the resource collection thing and that actually changes the tool depending on the stage you're on it can be the shovel or it can be the pickaxe you've got the building stuff you got the blocks they're all such simple animations in isolation that they're barely even worth talking about i do like how they all kind of coalesce together though like the block animation is what an arm and a hand waving a little bit but it just feels so minecraft it is cool that they managed to translate the game so faithfully into smash in many ways at least from an aesthetics perspective gameplay is kind of hit or miss i've talked about this before i hate how so much of his game plan is centralized around minecart that's really not how i expected a minecraft character to play but that's neither here nor there everything's nice and clean it's very well indicated visually including when you're crafting something i like how they brought the meter in to really let you know exactly how long the animation is going to take sound design is all ripped out of minecraft which means it sounds really good because minecraft has fantastic iconic sound design what do you seriously want me to do with this one though it's about as well handled as i guess you could have asked for but he's barely moving and yes i know that mr gaiman watches innate here i think mr gaiman watches sprites actually have some real genuine charm behind them though even if you didn't necessarily know who he was i think a lot of that was steve only applies if you already know what minecraft is let's clean up the zelda gang zelda chic and ganondorf zelda's gnaria's love this one looks pretty good reasonably faithful reference to ocarina of time obviously it works a little bit different between the two games but not too shabby zelda herself is moving very animatedly inside it she does a really aggressive twirl that's something that zelda's animators actually consistently get right with her her moving along with the magic you can see it up closer here like there's really a lot of momentum behind that surprising amount of momentum and there's a decent bit of effort with trying to distort her behind the crystal i highly doubt this is you know a perfectly accurate refraction into fraction stimulation they're cheating heavily but good enough for the context and cheating is a huge part of what graphics work is my degree is in computer science with the graphics and video game focus and i remember all sorts of moments where you'd be like okay but what if i take how light actually works and like multiply it by 1.2 and mix in a bit more red i've never done industry graphics work but the people i've spoken to who have especially in the video game world say yeah that essentially describes the job cheat as much as you can and i think this cheating looks just fine connecting with the move [Music] it doesn't feel fantastic it's not really supposed to though the purpose of this move is to make you invincible and act as kind of a pseudo counter or as a reflector more than being a really strong attack in its own right and it's a multi-hit i think all of that's honestly fine and if you don't connect with anything that kind of jangly magical sound design i think feels pretty good here she i really like the pose she goes into when she's charging the needles looks very ninja she actually strikes almost the same pose as greninja's idol stance which i swear to god was an accident i've just got the character set to random for a lot of these and then when she fires the needles too again fantastic posing on that you can see it off stage a little bit look at how strong that silhouette is on the ground yeah it looks great you can see it up close here the charging on the ground and then launch really fluid motion in the air [Music] i'm gonna say the charging animation in the air is not nearly as distinctive as it is on the ground but it's not bad and then the actual throw in the air is fantastic as well yeah that was really convincing the biggest thing with the charging animations is that they're clear enough so that your opponent is unambiguously sure that's what you're doing i think they both meet that criteria you can see the needle as she charges it up and then she actually gets more needles as she keeps charging and then they stay in her hand and those will last until i actually fire them out and you'll see that in slow motion the way she launches the mode doesn't really match the animation all that well but at full speed it's perfectly fine not really a great reference to the zelda series per se they mostly had to make sheik's move set up but i do think it fits in well with the direction they took her for smash at least sound design i do like the charging sound of the needles it cuts through the rest of the audio really well it's very sharp but it's still got some nice body behind it and then firing by itself not that much to comment on sheik's exhale that she does during every needle toss though that does actually sell this relatively weak projectile otherwise having a bit more effort and impact behind it and then ganondorf i know this is maybe a bit of a controversial opinion but i i don't like this one that much like it's not look it's a fan favorite for a reason i get that it feels incredible to actually connect with the thing is not only is it robbing him of a potentially way more appropriate cool canon move but it's also just falcon punch but lamer i say that for a few reasons obviously it doesn't have the actual falcon which is a really cool iconic particle effect this is just kind of a load of purple mess okay i'm being a bit harsh on it there ganondorf actually has pretty cool particle effects but it's clearly nowhere near up to the same standards as the falcon punch but also the pose he strikes right ever since it was changed to not be a true falcon punch clone anymore it was supposed to sort of match ganondorf's overall animation style which is very stiff and i don't really know what other word to use besides old like ganondorf in brawl in smash 4 was based on his twilight princess iteration and sakurai seemed to interpret that as meaning he was on the brink of death ultimate thank god made him actually able to move around again but this is kind of one of the holdovers and i really don't think this is anywhere near as convincing an attack as falcon punches again yes i acknowledge it is very fun to hit someone with this move cool it hits absolutely as hard as you'd expect i will give it that would still rather have something else zelda solid 8 here for this one clever reference nice execution on it chic that one i actually think is going to go up in s here it's not the most dramatic move in the s tier slot but everything about it feels so fluid and satisfying really great piece of animation work and then ganondorf yeah i'm maybe going to be a bit controversial with this one and it's going in b tier standalone is probably an s tier move but i'm not judging these moves standalone the context they're put in does matter all right i brought up greninja might as well do him and let's just get the rest of the pokemon while we're in there incineroar lucario and mewtwo your ninja's water shuriken this feels so satisfying to use i don't care if you're using it on the ground i don't care if you're charging it up all the way and getting that really nice extended multi-hit i don't care if you're using it for that little bit of air stall and it's such a nice stall too makes it feel very tricky as a movement mix-up which is perfectly in line with his role as a ninja character again you know you can argue whether that's gameplay you can argue whether it's animation it's probably a bit of both but it just feels good that's all i know oh slow motion for the uncharged version is he pulling water out of the sacks on his legs [Music] is that supposed to be what's happening there i don't know he's not doing that with all of his moves that make use of water so it's a little bit hard to tell i'm gonna err on the side of that's not what he's doing because if he charges it up he immediately takes his hands off those water sacks whereas you'd think if the implication was that he was taking more water to charge the shuriken up he'd be taking more water out of the size which means his hands would stay on them good animation regardless though again very classic ninja and it feels a little bit more controlled than cheeks which considering there's only ever going to be one projectile out of time makes sense to me the charging animation on it too love the satisfying spin of the shuriken all those nice water particle effects around it greninja s here i think the particle effects for the shuriken are some of the cooler looking ones in the game i think the actual animation of throwing it is really well done concepts great incineroar one of the overall better animated characters in the game in my opinion and darkest lariat is a signature move in the pokemon series so you'd expect some particular attention to be paid to it and just look at those motion smears around his arms alone right this is some of the best use of motion smears in the entire series and the particle effects and ultimate are fantastic overall watch it in slow motion and you can see the particle effects but you can also see just that fantastic sense of momentum incineroar has the entire way through how he perfectly goes in and out of each individual rotation he gets sparks flying off the belt too which looked very convincing because you know of course if you were to wave like a piece of flaming paper around you would have debris flying off it all the time i had to switch to a stage without a railing because i wanted to check his feet oh he actually stays on one foot the entire time interesting i didn't actually realize that's what he was doing it looks kind of insane if you really zero in on it but incineroar sells it perfectly i've never questioned that before connecting it feels good if you connect the strong hit there are a couple of sound effects that are more reserved for really heavy hits considering incineroar's heavyweight status and the fact that this is one of the harder hitting moves in his kit i feel like it might have warranted that but you know pretty solid overall and then the lingering hits i mean those are kind of whatever little glancing blow sound effects that match the whatever little glancing blow it's fine another rest here for me this is one of my favorite animations in the game period i think they absolutely nailed it mewtwo mewtwo only has one throw animation regardless of the level of charge that the move is at but it's such a committal throw animation that i actually think it doesn't even really matter because you can see that even if the shadow ball is charged up all the way that still feels appropriate to be using to send that big ball of energy out so when you're firing the smaller ones out it feels like he's just putting so much weight behind that you can almost say too much weight because the mini shadow balls actually don't travel that fast or hit that hard at all but it's rare that you're gonna hear me complain about a move being too heavy feeling in terms of the actual arcs of the shadow balls they're great this move is supposed to be you know a little bit weird it's a ghost type move so it's supposed to be a little bit off-putting and eerie and it matches that tone well and it's also just generally faithful to the way it was portrayed in the earlier sprite based pokemon games it was originally a bit of a weird one to give mewtwo admittedly it wasn't really that associated with him but nowadays i think it is much more so and then the particle effect i went with for the shadow ball is really nice that looks fantastic and unlike a lot of mewtwo's just random purple nonsense everywhere this one actually does have a contextual reason to exist from youtube the canon character this purple energy is just not really a thing in the same way certainly not when he first came out but shadow ball okay fair enough charging pose is pretty standard and straightforward and is a little bit weird that the shadow ball pops up before he actually reaches his hands together like that but you know gets the job done sound design i do like the travel sound of the shadow ball everything else is a little bit disappointingly mundane right there aren't that many ghost type moves that you could really pull from here i feel like they could have gone a bit eerier and a bit cooler and more distinct with it i think mewtwo is going to be an a tier i love the particle effect and he's got a really solid throw animation the rest of it is good i don't think it's anything mind-blowing and sound design you know i don't normally hold sound design against a move too much but this is one particular case where it actually does stand out to me as kind of an issue but still a cool move that does feel satisfying to hit with and then lucario this one obviously needs to be evaluated in a couple different spots because if he has no aura it's significantly smaller than if i go flora where it becomes this gigantic mess interestingly enough lucario for some reason is not one of the characters they made ambidextrous you can see that as i turn him around he actually turns around turns around rather than wiggling so that means that if you charge the orosphere on this side it actually looks quite different than charging it on this side and yet they did seem to compensate for this by having the aurasphere itself kind of almost appear behind him no matter what so you can still see his silhouette either way even though in theory that shouldn't really be how this works so a bit of a clever solution there i don't really know why they decided to do that as opposed to just having him be one of the ambidextrous characters most of the time the characters who aren't ambidextrous are the ones with weapons or something like that which obviously would mean that the left hand is always assigned to have to do the same thing so you can't just have the character flip around and have the other hand doing it right but in any case it works the silhouette's still very readable even with this gigantic energy ball and it's a cool looking energy ball really nice particle effects on that kind of swirly cosmic feel to it aura from what i understand of the pokemon series is supposed to be this kind of spiritual energy sort of deal so yeah okay fair enough charging animation for lucario very similar to mewtwo he's kind of mewtwo's spiritual successor he replaced him in brawl i think he sells a little bit better though it kind of has something to do with the fact that lucario is more of the spiritual monk-esque kind of character to begin with maybe something to do with the way his hands start very closed and convincingly open up like that as if he's really containing the energy but i think this does look a little bit better than metis variant personally think that while the larger aura sphere obviously is more dramatic in terms of just pure particle effect i still prefer mewtwo's design a bit but that's so subjective admittedly so is this video i do like the aura actually rising off of lucario always got the ball charged though it reminds me a little bit of like the northern lights i'm not really sure if that's what they're going for they're probably not going for that but it wouldn't really shock me if that was the case either sound design so that's uncharged what about charged there is a bit of a difference between them yeah the fully charged one sounds more frantic back to uncharged yeah the modulation is being done at a slower rate there's some other changes going on there too in terms of connecting it there's the uncharged charged and then the hitbox they all feel good the sound design is still relatively generic but i really don't mind that anywhere near as much on aurasphere as i do on shadowball it does seem like a much more standard energy kind of attack and lucario's vocalizations while he's charging it up and launching it sound fantastic they do a lot to sell its power they literally got the goku voice actor from dragon ball what are you expecting there yeah think i can say ester for this one and this one is obviously on a bit of a sliding scale you know at lower sense it's way less dramatic i'm gonna say i don't like using it nearly as much as mewtwo's at higher percents though where lucario's aura mechanic charges up his entire moveset and it really needs to come forward and do its job here to make the move feel more powerful it really does aurasphere feels fantastic once you start reaching those mid and upper percents love the sound design love the posing it's all really good bayonetta if you want to bring up posing look no further right that's bayonetta's whole deal the fact that she alternates between the handguns and the lag guns that's pretty great the charge up particle effects on this one are so cool too you know they're really faithful representations from bayonetta and bayonetta has a great visual design you can see it in slow motion here's the hand version really big flour she actually puts one of the guns completely behind her head and the pose is so exaggerated and then with the legs again very smooth animation into position i will say all but at the very end she doesn't really overshoot is the only thing i think with the hands it looks great but just watch near the very end of the animation with her feet as she's sort of settling into position it doesn't look that natural she more just snaps into place you see what i mean there's not really that much of like an overshoot and then the legs come back to where they're supposed to be which is how gravity actually works but pretty small nitpick and i'm gonna say at full scale it's not something you completely ignore but it really doesn't come through that much either [Music] considering it's one of the most realistic guns in the series it doesn't sound particularly gun like but that doesn't mean it sounds bad i actually think it sounds pretty good and they supposedly gave two different variants one for each version of bayonetta yeah they do sound different it's such a tiny detail that you almost wonder why they even went ahead with it but for the true fans i guess yeah ester there's a lot of stylish detail in here and it's mostly been done really well little mac two different ones we gotta look at for little mac here we got the straight lunge and we've got the ko punch straight lunge just charge it up all the way he does sell that pretty well and i love how intense the posing is at the end here's the charge after this and you'll see it's quite a long charger but it's well done little matt gradually adjusts his stance and gets more and more torqued to really visually indicate the fact that he's about to unleash it it's a skit along the ground that from a pure physics perspective doesn't really make any sense but it does make sense because this is a video game you know what i mean and the particle effects on it are nice this is my favorite part here though that posed at the end with the flaming red fist very over the top very 80s it works so well hold on completely unrelated detail i just noticed why is one of little mac's arms so much bigger than the other look at that massively ripped and that one's not what the hell has that always been a thing i i don't understand this has nothing to do with the move anymore i've just never seen this before oh it's gross now that i've seen it i'm not going to be able to unzip it okay yeah sound design on jolt haymaker again this is one of the big charge up moves where i feel like the final hit could be a little more punchy and the vocalization like come on man put a little more enthusiasm into it and then of course chao punch so first off he gets that very classic round bell once it's activated not only is that a pretty fun and very appropriate detail for boxer character but it also plays an important gameplay role right it now lets your opponent know they need to be looking out for the ko punch and then when you land it there we go there's some actual enthusiasm from little mac and the sound design seems way more appropriate too it goes without saying that he really commits to this move in fact i've had to get kale punch for thumbnails before and there are actually so few usable frames because he's leaning down so hard so a lot of the time you can't actually tell that what he's doing is a punch until the very last moment yeah it comes out really quick they don't have very long to sell the fact that he's winding up that far and yet it comes through anyways it's a really nicely done animation little mac going up in the s-tier squad i think both those moves are done well we fit trainer not only do i think this is one of the more clever ways to utilize the yoga pose gimmick generally speaking i've said before i'm really not that impressed by the design for wii fit trainer there's nothing else they really could have done with it but this actually does have some creativity behind it and on top of that it's also one of the times where i think the flaws in our animation style don't really come through as much because wii fit trainer doesn't do a lot in terms of body breaking or motion smears or generally particle effects of any kind this one that's not really an issue it does have a pretty decent particle effect on it that alludes to the sun but also because she's not doing a whole lot to hit you the fact that her arms don't really do a whole lot to sell the power of the swing isn't as impactful as it is with a lot of her other moves now would this move benefit if she did have some motion trails on her arms probably let's be honest yeah they still probably would but because there is some other stuff going on here she's got the healing smear she's got the actual ball itself kind of obscuring part of her it's not anywhere near as big a deal as it is for essentially any other move she has you can see it in slow-mo here like the actual pose itself is so basic but again it is at least kind of a clever way to use it and the actual attack it's not really that convincing it's not as good as it is with a lot of these other charge up big ball of energy moves but it's what they're working with it's done better than a lot of her stuff sound design very different charging sound than a lot of the cast i do think it works though you know this one has some healing properties to it and it's about fitness and it's about the sun so it's a little gentler and i think it's appropriate i like the whistle sound to indicate it's finished charging too that is a cool detail on wifi trainer and then firing it stand effects of the move itself but she does have good vocalizations i guess b-tier for this one i think when you compare it to a lot of these chargeable ball moves it does come up short but it's got some stuff going for it too i think it's one of her better animations i just don't think wii fit trainer is a very well animated character rosalina rosalina is a character who's supposed to be you know very elegant and very flowing and also kind of floaty space galactic princess that's exactly how you'd expect her to be animated this move i would say ties into it pretty well on the way out yeah it's kind of a nice contrast where rosalina's just kind of like go get him and luma's barreling through much more aggressively on the way back it's much more of a gentle animation on both ends this is the move that you use to de-tether and re-tether luma and i like the rainbow halo effect they had around it to indicate when it's de-tethered it's a very subtle way of doing a diegetic uh status indicator like that i will say it could maybe be a little bit bolder this is the kind of thing that can get lost in the middle of an intense fight but it looks very nice and it's a good detail just functionally i feel like maybe you could have a bit more going for it rosalina players are generally going to know when they're tethered or not their opponent might not nearly as much though you can see the charge up animation here rosalina does wind up into it a little bit it's not that intense luma looks way more intense of course particle effects on it are nice very smooth out you go kind of deal and then bring it back i like the trail behind luma it's actually reminiscent of the ones that mario himself uses in super mario galaxy connecting it when it's uncharged and then charging up [Music] i really like the charge up sound on that and i really like luma's cry as it sent out together they make this move feel very distinct it's not really supposed to be used as a you know charged hitbox a lot of the time the main purpose of this is just to de-tether and re-tether luma but for the times where you do use it like that it feels quite good atf for rosalina it's not the most they do with luma in any of her animations and there are a few minor nitpicks you can look at but overall pretty solidly done inkling this is probably the move on inklings kit that most showcases the ink mechanic and it's a cool mechanic right there's a lot of interesting details with it i like the way that the ink is naturally applied and naturally comes off it looks very smooth you should see it happen with luigi in just a second here yeah you're starting to see and it does look like relatively convincing evaporation the ink canister gradually depletes as the gun is fired that's all good stuff but that's more universal ink stuff in terms of this move specifically i like it it's a convincing firing animation the way that you tilt up and down is pretty smooth the head bob is a little bit unnatural the head doesn't really quite move perfectly along with the rest of the body but the body itself tracks pretty well recoil looks solid the spray makes sense even saw its range start to deplete fairly naturally looking at the very end when you started to run out of ink pretty convincing step into the spray the inkling really plant their feet into the ground before they start firing the gun off the splatter shot is obviously just a straight up reference to splatoon it's not a particularly creative move choice but the way that they chose to implement it actually is a little bit interesting sound design actually feels really satisfying to use i think that's probably just taken straight out of splatoon it feels good a tier and i was kind of considering s tier originally but as i used the move more and i saw the head tilt thing i couldn't really unsee it it does look very unnatural sitting on top of the rest of the smoothly moving body piranha plant patui this one's fun to control and there's not really anything else in the game that really works like this right with you just being able to keep it bobbed up and down like that and then depending on where it is that depends on how far you can actually throw it i also really like rhonda plans animation if you have a patooi out me try and throw another one ah so sad so dejected look at this entire thing in slow motion there's the launch really nice body breaking on that and then trying to throw another one out ah they put so much personality into such a simple design i feel like this was taken as a personal challenge by someone a sound and then the launch that's just so good across the board for me i love little pop sounds is swallowing sans 2 all very distinctive oh that's really well done and then it does feel quite good to hit someone with [Applause] yeah piranha plant welcome to ester interesting one here shulk with his monado arts bit of an interesting one to evaluate this is almost as much of a ui critique as anything else so this is how you originally used the move right back in smash 4 you just had to tap through and select it and tapping through and selecting it to its credit still looks nice i like that little smear particle effect as it's moving around only takes a couple of frames to switch between them let's see what's going on there yeah you see just a very subtle little bit of bounce between the icons as you switch between them it doesn't just pop up flat it gets very slightly bigger and then very slightly smaller and then sort of expands out to its original size that's actually a technique that i and many other youtubers use to put elements on screen all the time sort of a tried and tested classic of course nowadays though no one's actually tapping through all this stuff they're just gonna use the wheel which is a fantastic addition to ultimate and it does work very smoothly and it does exactly what it's supposed to do except for the fact that there are five arts and there are kind of four main directions you can hold the controller it's not that bad it's still a generous enough window but you know it feels just slightly awkward if you're not used to it only other critique i have here is that the icons are actually kind of low resolution yeah like surprisingly low resolution you can see the aliasing on them very clearly are they just taking the smaller icons and blowing them up they didn't make like separate larger versions you don't really notice it as much when you're tapping through you still do kind of see it though there are some other assets in smash which are just very noticeably low resolution and it's just kind of you know a consequence of having to cram in as much info as you can into your game sometimes you need to compress sometimes you can't be using huge textures and things along those lines but this does actually seem kind of glaring now that i'm looking at it switching to a different art oh it actually looks like he has a bit of a different animation for each one that's interesting smash buster shield i'm trying to get speed trigger why are you not triggering oh there's speed okay and jump so okay he does have a unique pose for each art something i've never actually noticed before and they tie into the role of the art pretty well so smash looks very aggressive that's almost the pose that a general would use while he's charging into battle with his army buster's still aggressive but a little more subdued and subtle which makes sense considering that's more of the combo art shield yeah very defensive and protective speed well i mean that one's pretty blatant and then jump pan to the sky again makes a lot of sense and i like the fact that they have the monado arts affect different parts of the body too so there's jump and you can see it's only on his feet and then same for speed you can see it just on his feet too and the icon on the sword yes that applies to all of them but it's obviously only affecting his feet as far as his actual body goes and then smash art shows up on his hands very aggressive again buster shows up only on the sword itself and yet smash does not show up on the sword that's kind of interesting it doesn't necessarily make a whole lot of intuitive sense to me shield on the torso though yeah we're back this is completely in line with how i'd expect this to be portrayed sound design speed jump some subtle sound design differences between them the mobility-based ones tend to be slightly more trebley for example and then the voice acting for shulk's great tea for shulk there's some stuff i could criticize if i really want to it's not that bad though and it does some other stuff that's pretty cool pac-man this was kind of a weird move to give to pac-man representing the bonus fruit from the pac-man game with all sorts of different arcs and stuff like that all sorts of different properties it's pretty cool though i actually think this is a smart decision some interesting details with this one too like for example after you hit orange suddenly the charge time to go up to the next fruit doubles and that's because in pac-man after you hit orange the fruit started changing every other level rather than every level one two three four five six seven yeah that's a cool touch charge up animation is fun i like the 8-bit sprite effects along with it and then actually throwing the objects feels good too there is only one throwing animation between every fruit but they did make it versatile enough that i don't really think that's a problem yeah like that's probably one of the weirder fruits and it still works perfectly fine and then if you go up to the key which is the strongest one still looks fine and then if you go up to the bell which is probably the most distinctive actual travel arc of any of them it still works perfectly fine with that throw animation slow motion here yeah like you can see at quarter speed it looks like it slips off pac-man's hand a bit but if you speed that up it's fine sound design very classic 8-bit stuff [Music] that one of course the movement sound comes right out of galaxian that's the most distinctive one after you stop charging it up the sound design gets a bit more generic but the charge up is fun and gives the move a lot of character ester i think making pacman a retro celebration character was the right call and this is one of the moves that showcases it best not particularly retro joker this move does a lot of different stuff and it's all good stuff even just this basic firing pose here really distinctive really stylish i know comes from persona which has about as much style as you could ask for in a video game and this is definitely one of the moves that showcases it and then of course you've got the gun slide and you've got the gun dash very roguish appropriate for the source material and you've got the downward angled gun and you've got what is for some reason the upward angled gun i'm not totally sure how the direction hold correlates to what you're doing there but they all look great there's just the basic firing animation you can see how smoothly he alternates between different poses there and each pose is very distinctive and strong and then here's the jumping variant really smooth twirl on that one even the landing pose is really good and then the upward variant again surprisingly smooth it doesn't really read nearly as strongly at full speed but here you can really see the detail and it's nicely done i like the flow that his coattails have on this one they become like almost a little bit pinwheel-ish i feel like they could have even taken that slightly further but it works well as is and then the gun just even using it in the air looks great to look at that laid back action and then how smooth it looks as he transitions this is a fantastically animated move in terms of sound it just sounds like a gun like an actual straight up gun cleanest here okay let's wind the dlc down here we got hero and banjo multiple stages of this one first off can i just say that hiro has some of the smoothest cancel animations just completely randomly like that looks fantastic at any point in the charge up in terms of the actual attack you got frizz you got frizzle and you have cafriz and kafriz that's a big boy i really like how that fireball feels to throw and it looks great sounds great as we'll look out later this one does have different throwing animations for all of them frizz frizzle much more aggressive already and then cuff frizz is just straight up anime nonsense but it's anime nonsense that i enjoy i wouldn't say the particle effects for these are anything particularly special to write homeboat i really do like how well the basic little fireball there though just the frizz synergizes with a throw animation i don't know what it is about that one the fireball is just like the perfect size for his hand it fits in there so well it's got a weird satisfaction to it frizzle this one it doesn't do quite the same for me the pose is nice still but the fireball it's not small enough to have that same like sneaky quality to it but it's also not explosive and over the top enough to really do much for me in that aspect either it's just kind of this awkward middle ground which makes sense for the middle charge i know this is actually a very good projectile like the double helix thing is kind of cool but i don't know this one doesn't do that much for me as i said though frizz now this one just feels like an absolute beast yeah i love that build up there right before he throws it out and these particle effects basic fire particle effects but they're well done and i like the fire trails that it leaves on the ground after you land it they linger for a good time wow and then the charge up it's functional i like the way his hand gradually raises higher and i also really like those rings and then there's one little shine to indicate when you move between frizz and frizzle which is a good little functional detail that also looks pretty decent yeah it's a solid charge animation context i'm going to be honest i always remember capri sounding a little bit more impactful than it actually is very tropey jrpg magic stuff but you can't really blame the dragon quest series for that they helped popularize some of those tropes kind of debating between a and s tier for this one but i'm in a good mood and then banjo i'm just gonna tell you right now it's going in s tier of course this is going in st here this is so good i love how into it both banjo and kazooie are here the slapstick animations on these characters are just absolute top notch even just this basic one here is so detailed and has so much bounce and life into it banjo immediately leaning down kazooie doing that squawk and then smoothly disappearing back into the bag just watch the way her neck stretches the moment before her head actually disappears back into the backpack it's so well done this character is just on a different level in terms of animation and then of course if you keep it up the transition is done so smoothly too banjo just whips her out and it's a pretty dramatic transition right you've got a full-fledged creature coming out of the backpack and moving along to a held position in only a few frames and yet it looks great in slow-mo and full speed kazooie has a lot of body braking going on during the actual egg launch just the act of moving around with kazooie in your arms still feels really smooth the wok looks good too and then when you fire an egg banjo actually gets a little bit of a grin on his face every time too putting her away again as smooth as you could ask for ah everything about this is so good sound design [Music] 10 out of 10 bowser jr this is a cool move to have included very faithful to the mario series including that weird twirling cannonball but it's done pretty well smooth little twirl the bowser jr does there including for the charged up version and frankly if bowser jr wasn't doing that the move might be a little bit quicker in terms of animation quality rather than gameplay quality i really like that notice that the cannonball is actually a little bit bigger than the barrel they cheat a little bit with that the cannonball actually spawns in front of the barrel from the looks of it it doesn't come out of it which also solves the problem of if something comes out of a barrel it has to be straight so then how is the cannonball spinning they do obscure it pretty well with the smoke cloud so you don't really notice that certainly not at full speed and scale yeah no one's picking up on that and going like wait a minute and then i like the daredevil pose the bowser jr strikes on top of the clown cart when he's charging it up too point forward as well they're not afraid to do some body breaking on the clown cart too this is theoretically a really big animation restriction right bowser jr by himself is a being but he's stuck inside essentially a sphere how do you give that lifelike animation and the answer is just make it move as if it's alive like yeah sure it should be made of metal it shouldn't be stretching and descending like this but who cares it looks better on screen sounds good i wish it maybe had a bit more of an air rushing sound that's kind of my only major complaint but i had that problem before with spherical stuff the charge up and impact are pretty solid though only other complaint i have about the animation which admittedly is not the animator's fault at all the second it touches the ground the hitbox completely disappears that looks so stupid in the grand scheme of things though a lot of good stuff to say about this one hey dear duck hunt this is kind of a cool reference i guess they obviously couldn't pull exclusively from duck hunt's own game so they had to bring in some other 8-bit retro stuff most of this i like the physics on it i like the retro light zapper targeting reticule i like the fact that you can see some bullet holes get formed in this as it takes damage right there you see a hole two holes three holes what i like more than anything else though is just the grin on duck hunt's face they do this great thing with his facial expressions where you know most of the time he's just kind of a cute dog and then just for a few frames at a time he becomes a complete piece i like the actual kick too that's kind of fun sound design [Music] interesting juxtaposition where it's clearly using retro sound design yet for most of duck hunt's kit they decided not to use actual 8-bit sprites sounds good though i don't really feel too strongly about this one but i also don't really find myself having anything to complain about so a tier i guess actually pretty well done than the kirby gang meta knight king dedede and kirby himself i think the best thing i can say about the mock tornado is that it's very distinctive you know what i mean like meta knight is not orange why is he in an orange tornado i don't really know but no other character is really doing something like that so okay gone on to become a bit of a signature move for him i will say this is not my favorite iteration of it it looks a little bit wispy and thin i get the intention was probably to make it so that meta knight himself was still very visible inside going back to its brawl days though i actually think i prefer the slightly more solid looking version there this doesn't look bad though interesting that his wings come out too that's something you see a lot when meta knight is doing air based stuff the cape transforms into wings and vice versa this one's less obvious than some of his other air based stuff you know like a lot of his special moves make a lot more sense than the mock tornado where it barely even looks like he's necessarily needing to use his wings here but i guess apparently is is he even using his wings at the beginning it's honestly kind of hard to tell no okay i actually don't think the wings come out while he's in the tornado they only happen at the very end yeah there's a good frame you can clearly see it's still a cape do the wings come out if he stays on the ground the entire time oh no they don't okay that's interesting so what if he starts in the air and ends up on the ground okay yeah i know it's always just an air base thing i guess to make his special fall look more distinctive what happens with dimensional cape so dimensional cube is the only time where that never happens huh i guess if you call it a cape you kind of can't have it become wings can you sound design that's kind of lame no vocalization is just a light fluttering sound was going into this one thing it was going to be an s but you know what between the bad sound design and this not being my favorite take on the particle effects i actually think i'm bumping this down to a i like the concept behind the mock tornado it's a cool move but it's just lacking a little bit here king dedede's inhale and i think you know where this is starting to go just look at king dedede's jaw [Music] it's so ridiculous in just the right way and then that very self-satisfied head snap he does at the end of the animation too small touch but i like it it does look penguiny right i'm pretty sure that it is using a penguin reference slower speed there to get a better sense of it there it is and he's close and the act of inhaling someone's a lot of fun i love how just bloated and ridiculous he gets and he's not bothered by it at all he's actually having a good time he just waddles around happy as can be and then the sound design for this one as far as air rush sounds in the game go that's gotta be one of my favorites it's really distinct and really satisfying a little bit lower pitched and then actually inhaling someone the spit sound is fun it's taken from kirby i think my favorite moment is the instant he's actually inhaled someone and his stomach grows though there's this very satisfying little thud that you hear king dd i don't see how this one ever doesn't go nest here this move's hilarious and then there was kirby i spent this entire session trying to decide what to do with you but in for a penny mario pretty standard fireballs it's a bit of a shame we don't get any kind of faux italian noises out of kirby for this one i do like how strong the fireball throwing pose is though donkey kong this hat is hilarious i don't understand why he doesn't just have the hair swirl but this is definitely one of the funniest of the og-12 looks extremely angry when he's actually charging the punch up but when he throws it out has no expression whatsoever on his face kind of disappointing link loved the classic hat funny enough that's actually made its way into the kirby series afterwards the bow is just comically small as far as i can tell that is literally just link's bow model directly shrunk down samus this hat rules i love the helmet it's a shame the clipping is so bad on this one but what are you really gonna ask the artist to do here kirby doesn't have an arm cannon so it just kind of awkwardly charges in front of his hand but you know what as goofy as it is i don't even mind dark samus clippings even a little bit worse on this one because the helmet has some bulbous points that stick out right around where kirby's arms are supposed to be other than that pretty much the exact same thing awkward charge position and all yoshi top tier hat if anyone has anything bad to say about this hat i will fight them using the copy ability best voice acting in the video so far don't even care kirby [Music] doesn't give you anything but a different star sound should give you the super inhale or something like that that'd be great does let me talk about the default animation though which is also very good listen to that classic kirby sound then the active inhaling love fat kirby love me some fat kirby the spit [Music] love the sound effect too you do not truly appreciate just how bizarre and messed up looking that thing on the back of fox's head is until you see it in the context of someone bald uses the same gun model does it have the same gun animation hey it does it has the same animation that fox uses on his blaster considering it's literally once again just the exact same thing scaled down i would hope so pikachu if this is not already a plushie somehow it should be a plushy the fact that the tail is coming out of the middle of kirby's back actually does not bother me as much as it should because it looks like just an entire pikachu toy sitting on top of him [Music] voice work is great and i'm pretty sure kirby is just straight up trying to do pikachu's pose luigi still not a line of italian anywhere in your shot i do like that he's doing the luigi l finger thrust though just minus the finger part nest does not wear his hat backwards kirby does i don't get it kirby thinks he's cooler than he is that's just great though the voice acting the pose love it all captain falcon funny enough this one actually is ambidextrous unlike captain falcon oh also shut up nerd is kirby doing the falcon punch jigglypuff hideous hat there's something deeply uncanny about that i don't know how something that's not even humanoid is uncanny but this is uncanny and the animation is not any better than jigglypuff gets access to burn it alive peach never really understood why this one doesn't come with the hair as well it may be because this was introduced in melee where hair physics were still a lot more demanding and difficult to animate but i think just the crown in itself is not the best looking hat sherry's the same hiding behind toad animation but kirby's gods for breakfast and saves his friends in the process i don't really think this fits still no hair probably just to keep it in line with peaches at the very least it does actually let you appreciate the distinctions between the crowns a bit more though hey look the toad's blue now and yeah of course it's the exact same animation for toad now bowser's hat this is a nice hat this is devil kirby i don't even think his eyebrows like his literal eyebrows are angry at all but he looks super pissed just because of the bowser hair placement actually gets a completely different stance than bowser for this one just the one footed thing i think it fits well his body literally does not track the flame in any way shape or form though it just tilts up and down independently another nice hat from the ice climbers i really like this one kind of rip-off that he only gets a single projectile though what's going on there also so many of these don't get vocalizations but this one does for some reason i don't get it chic always thought this one looks a little bit more like kirby's wearing a diaper than they probably intended it to i get that it's supposed to be chic scarf but it wraps way too far below kirby i know you see what i see needle charge kirby looks intense there the actual needle toss though i'm gonna say it doesn't look anywhere near as good as it does on cheek kirby does get the needles building up during the actual charge but they do not stick to kirby's hand once it's fully charged the same way it does with chic you can see it just disappears there until you actually throw it i do appreciate the kirby get something resembling the quick breathy vocalization that sheik does though zelda now you see this looks like how peach and daisy should have been handled and the fact that daisy was introduced in ultimate the same game where zelda's appearance was changed so they decided to update her hat should have updated the peach in daisy hats no doubt about it kirby's rocking the flow and locks here dr mario i'm okay with the headpiece i'm not necessarily sure it makes him look particularly doctorly though i wonder how bald doctors would feel about that statement still no italian pichu it's pikachu 2.0 i didn't mind pikachu so i don't mind pichu either that is significantly less funny than him saying pikachu though no no no no i do not care for this looks like he wants to bite the tendons in your ankles i do like the falco cool guy pose though i think it actually works better on kirby than it does on falco marth hat does the job just fine may i direct your attention to the inclusion of hair alongside the crown this time okay so at this point i think i can pretty safely say that essentially all of the weapons that kirby uses are purely just scaled down versions of the originals i like that he tries to do the marth regal pose on his way back to that little flourish right at the end there yeah who cares if your arm has to travel all the way across your head that's how kirby's always worked lucina what a great reference to include for a hat very confusing if you don't know anything about the fire emblem series but if you do nicely done now does the kirby lucina shield breaker have a different animation from the kirby marsh shield breaker [Music] oh it does he doesn't do the flourish the fact that his back foot comes off the ground while he's doing the stab means that he actually sells the power of the attack substantially better than either marth or lucina do young link i think the tiny bow actually fits in very well for kirby here it looks perfectly natural string actually goes all the way into kirby's body a little bit of an oversight on that one fantastic hat let's just get that out of the way immediately look at this thing again it's the piss just because of the eyebrow placement thing the actual warlock punch [Music] looks completely out of place but why not helps make it one of the single funniest moves in the entire game to actually hit someone with mewtwo giving kirby one of the creepiest hats in the game for decades now i hate this why does he have to have the weird neck handle why is the tail that shape oh it's awful shadow ball is pretty fun though i like that he gets the same really exaggerated throwing animation that mewtwo does roy classy looking hat the end of the headband almost looks like a cape on kirby or some coattails guess the same kind of stomp with the uncharged version actually looks pretty good on him really nice smooth flowing circular animation there charging it [Applause] hmm the only issue is that kirby can't pull his arms back nearly far enough to make it actually look like he's committing to a big attack there but uh what can you do same thing with chrom also the exact same problem with chrom though these new particle effects i'm sorry they're just a downgrade really weird hat very memorable hat i've actually always really liked this one has the same sound effects as mr gaiman watch and he also does the exact same only two frames of animation and one of those is him getting angry neat details swapped over to blue kirby for this one because kirby essentially just becomes meta knight we know from the kirby series that if meta knight loses his mask he just essentially looks like kirby could have just left it at that though the stubby horrible wings are a little bit much i don't understand why he gets these instead of the cape were they worried the cape was going to make him look too much like meta knight to be confusing in an actual in-game situation i don't know mock tornado still doesn't sound particularly good but this is actually one of the easier ways to see kirby in freefall because remember his actual upbeat that's kind of hard to do this one's a little weird i don't know about this yeah it does essentially the exact same animation minus the cool rings the rings would have been a little bit of an interesting detail to include even with the tiny stubby arms to actually stick them onto dark pit as expected the same hat just with a color swap which means also not particularly impressed by this one and surprise surprise he shoots the same bow with the same arrows zero suits samus interesting choice with the hair on this one literally just the ponytail none of the rest of her full head of hair it's a gun of course he still gets the biker helmet even if you select the classic wario skin i don't like the fact that this is the hat though i think it should be classic wario i think that's still what the vast majority of people would associate with the character even if for the smash series specifically they did decide to push the warioware look more that's great dell doesn't make any actual chomp noises though snake now this this is a fun hat and i like that the beard is not just copy pasted or from snake's uh texture it's actually i think just drawn on kirby it seems like it could be a bit of a lazy solution but i actually think it works very well grenade pole he actually gets a stance that respects snake where he's still holding the grenade very far behind him at first and he gets three different throw animations still man there's a lot of detail put into this one oh my favorite bit of detail though he still covers his ears or does kirby have ears you know what i mean this one's great like of all the fire emblem characters i think this is one of the hats that fits most naturally on kirby's head it looks really solid he's way too small to actually be getting any kind of leverage on the sword as he plunges it into the ground but that's part of the charm of moves like this watching kirby just try to handle these things that are obviously way too big for him i like his best attempt at a macho yell too squirtle taking the pichu pikachu approach i see weird hat not gonna say it doesn't fit though his cheeks even bulge out a little bit like squirtles do that's a cool detail i'd be sore again it's a similar concept i find this one a little bit less appealing i don't know something about the weird stunted bulb on his back just a little bit creepy still a terrible move concept but still really good animation i love him mimicking the venus or voice too charizard now why does this one not have a tail why does he get that horrible little deranged appendage with mewtwo but charizard of all characters does not give him a tail [Music] yeah continues to just kind of be worse bowser stance is once again not as good either diddy was a very obvious choice for a hat but that doesn't mean it's not a good looking hat on kirby i love the oversized bill on this one um the actual animation he gets to keep the really exaggerated recoil that's nice he says you get to keep the overcharge animation too yeah he does i love that lucas hat sensible enough it comes across completely differently on kirby to me compared to lucas though lucas it makes me think little kid kirby it almost makes me think like greaser [Music] good stuff for all the bad things i have to say about sonic and smash his moveset his animations his play style he does make a pretty damn good kirby hat shame the bounce off is just as lifeless though king dedede just replaced one inhale with another [Music] to be fair they actually did make a decent effort to differentiate them though olimar i genuinely do not know whether to love or hate this hat there's no other option now the move itself they actually had to adapt this one quite a bit and i like it substantially more with kirby than i ever did on olimar it actually somewhat looks like he's plucking something out of the ground even at slow speed there's way more of a sense of an actual pluck going on there lucario perfectly sensible hat they honestly really didn't need to change that much about this one the fringe is already kind of a natural stopping point for it charging up orosphere they did the same kind of cheat with lucario where you can kind of see kirby's silhouette anyways it does clip through his body noticeably more though at least at lower as high or as oh that doesn't actually affect the move i forgot about that yeah i guess kirby's is just normalized yeah it's fine it's nowhere near as good as lucario's though in functionality overlooks rob i could say a lot about this one but there's only one thing you need to hear best voice line in the game no debates allowed to link this seems like by far the most suitable bow for kirby the size even though it had to be scaled down a bit doesn't actually look out of place at all and the string was actually calculated right so there's no clipping this looks like it could be an in-game kirby copy ability even the floaty nature of the arrow easily the best of the links in my opinion wolf i don't know how i feel about kirby with the mohawk and the eye patch i think it's a better combo than the mohawk and the beak though why does it feel like the blaster animation works better here than it does on wolf maybe just because he's smaller i buy it more i buy the kick back off the gun way more here god kirby looks like a dork with villager's hair villager looks like a dork with village's hair too but kirby is not doing that style any favors the pocket [Music] he has the same inventory indicator that villager does i would expect that but good to see and then the release animation yep that sure looks like villager mega man this hat i think fits kirby very well there's a lot of clipping kind of like with samus's and dark samus's helmets but because the material of mega man's helmet is so much thinner it really doesn't read as awkwardly at all to me he's still doing that awkward hand thing though i picked the male wii fit trainer just to the curiosity so you still do get the female hat no matter what that makes sense i know they're not going to make multiple hat variants for kirby considering how insane the workload for this character is already still even knowing all of that it does feel just the slightest bit odd note of place they actually gave some pretty decent hair physics to the ponytail though certainly does not look that much like a yoga pose on kirby but it still fits reasonably well actually rosalina another mario princess another kind of weird looking just isolated crown another move that needed to be adapted quite a bit [Music] i like the way they handled the adaptation though the particle effects continue to look really nice here and the animation actually suits kirby well little mac hair is nice this is just straight up greaser hair i kind of wish he got the hoodie incorporated in there somehow though and kirby sadly does not get the ko punch he only gets the straight lunge but with that said the animation continues to be pretty good here greninja i'm not saying the hat doesn't make sense for kirby it still looks just so funny somehow though it is a little bit weird though that the ears are actually kind of differently shaped if you look at them side by side kirby's ears are rounder they're not nearly as pointed and they're curved differently than greninjas so i'm not totally sure what that's all about i get that the idea behind some of these pokemon hats is they're supposed to look more like toys that you would buy at a convention or something like that rather than trying to literally represent the pokemon i'll take it over more mewtwo alien fusions though don't get me wrong i think the animation actually continues to look very very good on kirby as well and i love the float that he gets again a little bit of an animation gameplay fusion feels even better here than it does with greninja charging it up all looks great palutena pretty decent hat the hair does hang down just kind of awkwardly and flatly here it almost looks a little bit like greased to kirby's head and then the attempts to say auto reticule sounds absolutely nothing like it but i actually kind of like that kirby pulls off the majestic animation pretty well too pac-man oh look how they massacred my boy kirby pulls off the 8-bit item summon animation and the throw animation very well that's about all i can say if you're gonna do this at least give him the slit eyes make him look a little more like pac-man not this horrible hybrid sin against nature robin i will say not the most flattering thing to pair the white kirby alt with this hair makes him look a little sun bleached summoning animation for this is actually not that good because kirby again he's doing the ambidextrous thing so the book is obscuring his face but it's still very very close to his body so it doesn't read particularly well nowhere near as well as it does with robin this is one of the cases where having long limbs is actually a huge benefit here shelk no hair no nothing else i think this one actually kind of works for me though kirby gets the same wheel i like his default stance does he get a different pose for each art it looks like he probably does yeah he totally does and i'm gonna say he does them just as well as shulk does and he even gets the same particle effects only on specific parts of his body oh there's a lot of detail on this one this is cool basic junior it's not a bad hat the incorporation of the bandana is cool kind of feel like it should be an actual mask for kirby though right i guess they do need to keep his mouth free so we can do the cannonball though you could pull the mask up when he does that in any case think the hat is perfectly fine and this charge animation is funny and it actually fits surprisingly well considering that the actual cannonball animation just uses the cart's mouth rather than kirby's mouth duck hunt this one should be a horrible mutant hybrid abomination but it's just not i don't even care it's cute as all hell it's the same fun can kicking animation that duck hunt does i kind of wish he got the same mischievous grin i don't even know how you would pull that off i think that would actually be kind of terrifying on kirby in some ways although more reason for me to want to see it but i think what we got is still great just the hat alone is worth the price of admission on this one ryu this hat looks great and he essentially already just uses ryu's moveset in the kirby series anyways this could totally show up in the kirby games is a pretty blatant omars the series does that constantly if you ever wanted to hear kirby shout hadoken now's your lucky day and shakunetsu as well they actually let you do the input versions of the move love this ken that is now a very angry looking kirby that aside pretty much the same thing it's the same distinction between canon ryu meaning that this is considerably less impressive cloud of all the messy anime hair hats that kirby gains access to this may be my favorite i like that it's draping over one eye making him look a little bit edgier very appropriate considering where he stole it from [Music] blade beam animation works surprisingly well for kirby he seems way too stubby to pull it off but he does not do the same thing cloud does where you can put the dust and debris in front of you because kirby always does the ambidextrous option coren this may be the single worst hat in the game this is just a complete mess not a surprise because it looks bad on coren and then when you distort it and try and put it on a completely different body shape where it covers up even more of them this is just a colossal mess it looks truly disgusting at the very least it is kind of funny to watch kirby try and wield this massive clamping jaw with his tiny stubby little limbs bayonetta i think kirby pulls the look off i'm gonna say it looks a little more librarian than killer witch but eh what can you do [Music] guess the hand variant and the foot variant the foot variant is hilarious on kirby look a little more like butt guns than feet guns though i think the inkling hat looks kind of goofy it's way too shiny like it looks fine in the context of inkling on kirby it sticks out so much splattershot still feels pretty good to use though that sure is a ridley hat almost makes him look like he's got kazia's hair weirdly enough i really like the poses kirby makes when he's throwing the plasma breath here looks pretty intense by kirby standards like there's something about it that just seems a little uncurvy-ish i know it's copying one of ridley's stances who is one of the more vicious characters in smash it seems strange but i kind of like it as a result of that yeah barbarian kirby this is what we like to see the arc that kirby's body follows is actually better than the arc that simon's body follows in terms of just making it look appropriate for the level of power being put into the axe toss funny enough because his arm actually starts all the way behind him and travels all the way in front of him this is not barbarian kirby you know this is basically the hat i think everyone expected him to get when king k rool was announced but i don't know i expected there to be a bit more of it i do not particularly care for it i will say though i'm glad they kept a very large blunderbuss for kirby because it is absolutely hilarious isabel we already know what the copy ability does as for the hat you know what not bad but i'm gonna take duck hunt any day of the week on this one not the same kind of competition for the top cat slot as there is for the top dog slot which is probably good because this one will be really hard to beat i think out of all the pokemon plush hat concepts this is one of the best looking ones and that's just standalone even on top of that incineroar is a wrestling character his moveset is very blatantly inspired by wrestling moves so you can easily think of kirby as just like a fan in the stands at an incineroar match and then the actual darkest lariat i think looks really well done on kirby as well actually goes on one foot the entire time the exact same way incineroar does harder to notice on kirby certainly because the dust is really obscuring his feet he's just so low to the ground but it's a cool bit of an extra attention to detail there the move is a lot of fun to use with kirby as well i'm completely on board with everything about this one piranha plant uh i mean i don't know what else they were really gonna do here uses all of the exact same sound design as brauna plant does which sounds kind of weird but i actually do like it what sells me most on this one though is just kirby's eating expression joker this mask just terrifies me and it took a long time to figure out what it reminded me of you know what it is it's the evil tweety bird from looney tunes when he took the jekyll and hide potion that thing scared the hell out of me when i was a kid tell me you don't see what i see here other than that it is kirby except he's got a gun hiro the hat looks good it is a little bit weird that it is not based off this incarnation of the hero though considering this is the default for smash that's essentially always what they do also a little bit weird that he gets the sword and shield as part of the getup despite the fact that he does not make use of it at all i guess that's just so iconic to this character i don't know anything about dragon quest but that's the only explanation i can come up with kirby does get the three levels of charge [Music] i'm gonna say it certainly does not read as well as it does on hero particularly the first two but the actual attack itself is still fairly fun to use but yeah he's just too stubby banjo-kazooie so the backpack works perfectly fine very sensible choice as part of the hat the necklace though that makes me think more like surfer dude or something than it really does banjo i know he's literally wearing the exact same one but the vibe you get is totally different between them in terms of the actual animation itself though like it's fantastic on banjo-kazooie of course it's gonna be fantastic on kirby as well everything just looks super smooth put it away oh hold on is that the real kirby uses a fake kazooie that is so weird i don't think i've ever seen this copy ability just like used in the wild before that's bizarre real kazooie or fake zooey though that animation still looks super smooth the entire way through this terry hat is easily one of the best hats in the series you've got the actual literal hat itself which looks good you've got the hair and you've got the gloves and then for the attack uh kirby's saying power wave i don't know what else you need in life and then even though kirby is a far stubbier character than terry is he still does a fantastic job of selling the fact that he's really plunging his fist into the ground there this is just one of the best copy abilities in the entire series easily fileless seems like a pretty sensible hat interesting that they decided to include the dagger as one of the elements that's not really something that i associate with by with obviously it's on the model but it's not really a biola thing per se also kind of funny that it looks like it was the same actual model for the dagger used between both of them but they had to scale it up for kirby the bow does clip into the ground a little bit for kirby that's a bit disappointing but you know it is a fairly large bow that wanted to keep it looking a bit oversized for them and they probably wanted to keep a fairly similar stance as well so i guess it does make sense i feel like they probably could have had him canted a little bit more and avoid this issue drawing the bow back though it does still convey a pretty good sense of power mim it may not count for the video but her copy ability does and it's a nice hat it looks pretty good just as a standalone thing and it also lets you appreciate the detail in the tuke a lot more a little bit low resolution just on the writing there but that's honestly such a minor detail who cares and then the attack itself that's all you get you don't get to angle it you don't get to control which arm you're using or anything along those lines as far as just an animation that sells the power of a punch though pretty well done they seriously just went ahead and made a whole new model for steve's hat admittedly it's a very simple model frankly i could probably make this one pretty comfortably but they still went through the effort and it looks pretty good honestly as far as you know a bunch of rectangles just slapped together it's got some actual charm to it as far as the copy abilities go he does get the resource gathering he cannot use the crafting table though that's just how that's going to be it looks a bit strange even by the standards of steve's already extremely stunted simplistic animations it almost looks like he's waving a conductor's baton around to me that just happens to be colliding with the ground as far as just actually placing blocks go though i think those actually pair really nicely with his jump animation that looks very natural and smooth to me as far as the grounded actual laying blocks animation not nearly so much it's got a bit of that ultra stubby arm thing going on again see what i mean his arm is just kind of twitching and steve's arm just kind of twitches too but he's got a little bit more to actually show at least the full range of arm movement but i'm not even worried about it because it kind of slots in with the concept sephiroth i am so on board with the sephiroth hair they had to make some you know some changes they had to shorten down the back a little bit and they had to make the front what do you even call this poofier than actual sephiroth i don't really know i like it though and then he does still get to keep three distinctive charge animations and despite the stubby limbs these ones actually still come across very well for me they all seem distinct they all seem very easy to read i think the middle one here is the one they had to adapt the most that really doesn't look very much like a bowling ball throw at all anymore like sephiroth did but it still looks perfectly fine in its own right pyra the hat's pretty much exactly what you'd expect it to be the attack itself looks good most notable part of this one for me is definitely the voice acting though and then mithra as well hat still looks good again mostly just a faithful translation why is that one so much clearer that is so much easier to make out than the flame nova and the jack once again translates over actually surprisingly well to kirby's way smaller frame there we go there's the spin and he even sells the impact of the final hit cause he had just another fantastically done hat they've got the one red eye they've got the gloves they've got the hair the fighting game characters really got some love more so the dlc ones i really like the animation for this one on the ground it's a little bit more faithful to kazia's in the air it seems like they took a bit of liberty with it it's less of the old-timey villain he puts his arms up more it's more just straight-up demon kirby devil kirby which i actually kind of love also makes the third forehead eye way more clear on kirby than you ever see it on kazia you see it right there in the middle of his forehead that's where the beam's actually coming out of on kirby that's super clear on kazuya i even zoomed in you barely see it and there you can see the difference in their aerial poses kirby's arms are actually coming up above his head where his kazias are hanging down sora the hat itself looks fine we've seen more than enough messy anime hair at this point they couldn't give him a keyblade really like don't get me wrong i don't care about kingdom hearts lore whatsoever and i actually think that the particle effects they've given him here is a substitute to sort of get around the copyright issue are actually pretty good looking and kind of a clever solution but man i do know that in the kingdom heart series having a keyblade is a big deal and i want good things to happen to kirby it may come as no surprise i like his voice acting a lot more than i like soras [Music] ah it's just a good time which just leaves the knees and for brawler i've picked one who looks very different than the default one i get why it has to be so lame just the face on a headband it's actually kind of cool that they at least let you have a non-default face but at the same time clearly a step below most of the other hats what i like a lot less is always having neutral special one no matter which one the me is using like this me here he is not using shot put and yet if i take his copy ability it's still the shot put again i do understand the rationale behind it three special moves to design and animate per character is a lot more than one and it also helps safeguard them say if they ever wanted to add another me at some point against having to do even more work that said knowing why they did it does not mean i have to like it i still think this is kind of lame as far as the shot put itself does go though i actually think that looks pretty good look at the line of action that kirby draws when he's doing that it looks so unified and powerful i'm gonna say that he actually sells this just as much if not more than me brawler does for sword fighter's gale strike not really a whole lot has changed here i will say one tiny little nitpick is this is definitely one of the few cases where the despawning item genuinely bothers me watch his hand while he's doing this he just comes back to idle stance or at least the final few frames of the animation are meant to look like his idol stands and then it just kind of awkwardly hangs there for a second and then instantly disappears it doesn't even like scale down out of existence or anything as i acknowledged earlier in the video the series does have a lot of stuff like this in it it's not really a huge deal and it's not a huge deal here i don't want to pretend that it is but this is one of the few instances where even at gameplay scale i do legitimately notice it and i'm a little bit bothered by it it's pretty prominent here and then with kirby i talked about his samus and dark samus copy ability having a bit of a floating orb problem and then me gunner also having a bit of that same problem and i think what's going on here is you get the same lack of arm cannon as you do with samus and dark simon's copy ability and you also get me gunner's positioning data which was a bit offset from the arm so if you put those together oh man that's just not even close is it like i understand you need to use your imagination to a certain extent with this one but that looks just straight up out of place especially in the air it looks like a glitch like it just looks like a straight straight-up problem with the move couple odd little details to end things off on there but overall like yes of course the copy abilities are fantastic additions to the game lots of love and care has gone into them they're extremely iconic parts of smash i am now going late into the third day of locking myself away in a boiling office pouring over individual frames of animation so much longer than i intended to spend on this project and right at the very end i've had to stack all of these tests on top of each other just to tell you what you already knew was coming yeah inhale s tier nice animation i tried to open photoshop back up to a finish kirby's placement and b move ryu and ken up into eight here i changed my mind on them and the files corrupted just so done thanks for watching there will be another episode of this put up the same as i did last time for patrons and youtube members and twitch subs to vote on i'm not putting another special move on the list though i need a break from special moves for a little while here's the final list presumably on your screen right now i'm going to try to assemble it from existing footage goodnight alright thanks for watching everyone let me know what you thought about the list likes and comments are a huge factor youtube uses to decide whether to share a video with more people so if you think this one deserved it much appreciated you can watch the last episode on forward smashes above main channel video on comeback mechanics below and patrons youtube members and twitch subs get perks like early videos discord access and the ability to vote on future episodes later people

Channel: MockRockTalk

Views: 387,916

Keywords: Smash Ultimate, alpharad, Nintendo, little z, super smash bros ultimate, smash bros ultimate, tier list, esam, hungrybox, ssbu, alpharad deluxe, Nintendo Switch, nairo smash, nintendo memes, nintendo, smash ultimate tier list, smash ultimate best attacks, smash ultimate best moves, super smash bros ultimate best moves, kirby, mockrock, worst of every smash move, smash ultimate worst moves, animation tier list, smash animation tier list, smash animations, smash ultimate animation

Id: Q2QVTEY5oz4

Length: 171min 0sec (10260 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 09 2022