Smash's BS Comeback Mechanics (Ft. Peanut & Armadillo)

comeback mechanics they've always been a bit of a contentious concept in the fighting game world uncharitably viewed as rewarding a player for losing and yet their popularity only seems to be going up as time passes as for super smash brothers well the series has never exactly been shy about joining the trend today i'm going to be diving into the pros and cons of some of smash's most extreme mechanics and i'll be assisted by two players who have had their fair share of experience in the area peanut one of the best little mac players in the world and armadillo one of the best lucario players will be dropping by to provide their insight should be a good time both these guys are active on a number of platforms and are also available to book for lessons on metaphy if you'd like to level up so be sure to check the description and pinned comment for links finally the topic of this video was voted on by my supporters through patreon youtube memberships and twitch subscription if you'd like to make your voice heard for what the next episode should be as well as get some other cool perks like early videos and discord access links for these will be in the description and pin comment as well let's do it [Music] let's clear some terminology up to make sure that we're all on the same page platform fighters the video game genre smash is a part of are inherently very comeback heavy due to the nature of the genre's win condition while there have been some entries which explore additional design space the vast majority of competitive platform fighter gameplay is purely based around ring outs knocking your opponent off any side of the screen unlike say in street fighter where characters are always guaranteed to survive a certain amount of punishment there's no floor on the number of hits a player needs to take before they lose one of their stocks in smash as much as a solid spike or shield break may be able to cause a comeback though i think it's probably a bit of a stretch to call those specifically comeback mechanics in smash i consider the term to mean a tool that makes your character significantly more powerful which requires a delay before it's active probably the most classic example being lucario with his aura as lucario takes damage and loses stocks in comparison to his opponent his aura starts to build which universally increases the damage and knockback he can output and also alters a number of his moves in other ways like aurasphere's increased radius or extreme speed's additional range another example would include something like terry's go meter which gives him access to the powerful super moves buster wolf and power geyser only when he's at 100 damage or higher on top of these kinds of moves which i'll refer to as hard comeback mechanics i also generally expand the definition to include moves which facilitate similar spikes in power without that power directly tied to being damaged which i'll call a soft comeback mechanic wario's waft would be a good example of this it still allows him to steal games once it builds up but this buildup happens passively over time or by chomping on things not by wario getting hit or losing one of his stocks i'm comfortable folding moves like this into the definition since yes it can act as a win-more function in addition to helping stage a comeback but in reality the same actually applies to many of smash's quote-unquote proper comeback mechanics there are a few combat mechanics which are truly designed mostly to help characters in losing positions but these are actually somewhat few and far between and then there are comeback mechanics with both hard and soft elements little mac's single-use ko punch does have its power meter filled by taking damage but also when little mac deals damage himself cloud's limit meter and joker's rebellion gauge are felt the same way granting them access to powerful limit break moves and arsene respectively and these characters also have further ways to fill their meters up manually so with the mechanic's terminology taken care of we can now move on to the mechanics themselves i said earlier that combat mechanics are a bit of a controversial topic and something that often comes up in the conversation is how they affect character balance it's important to note however that comeback mechanics don't inherently create unbalanced characters they do create some potentially extreme power spikes in certain stages of the game but provided the other stages are appropriately balanced to account for this so that the character's overall power is in line with the rest of the cast in theory what you'll end up with is a balanced character take zephros one wing form for example which activates when he's taken enough damage and grants him additional mobility damage output and armor on his smash attacks with the wing and effect sephiroth is undoubtedly a fantastic character easily one of the best in the game but his base moves that is fairly honest and actually a bit precise and easy to overwhelm so things roughly balance out here lucario's aura grants him even more raw power eventually allowing him to kill you at 30 percent but you wouldn't necessarily still be at 30 if you were fighting a character with better neutral options than lucario has access to he might have been able to win neutral a few more times in the match and put you at 60 80 100 percent much more reasonable percents to die at what people tend to walk away from these kinds of experiences with however is more just the moment when they died at 30 percent humans have an ingrained phenomenon called negativity bias meaning that if you're exposed to an equally positive and negative experience the negative one is going to leave more of a vivid impression sure you may remember stuffing wario's stubby limbs out over and over with your much better hitboxes but you'll remember the one time he did get in and waft you more this is certainly one contributing factor to the frustration comeback mechanics can invoke but it's not all a matter of perception there are absolutely tangible changes to the gameplay as well most notably comeback mechanics have a habit of encouraging one of the most illegal despised words in the platform fighter world camping gloomy has that waft axiom needs 100 to get rage driver online to get a similar tactic in his arsenal so and he actually is well aware of that camping is in short the refusal to engage with your opponent taking little max ko punch is an example this is one of the most destructive comeback mechanics in the game a massive unblockable hitbox that starts killing small characters around 20 percent it's also a temporary comeback mechanic little mac only gets one attempt to use it which you can dodge and if you wait for the perfect moment you can also hit him right out of it so if you haven't seen that perfect moment yet why on earth would you try and challenge this kind of tool even if the opponent is already a kill percent to a mac four tilt or something they will still run away and be scared even though they should really be doing that already i don't know why they weren't before but once i have chao punch it's clear that the opponent is infinitely more terrified than they were before regardless of like what stock they're on or what percent they're at it creates gameplay that's very polarizing and the same thing can be said for lucario's aura although maybe not nearly to the same degree camping isn't quite as encouraged against the lucario with high aura since there's no way to remove it outside of a definitive kill blow and in fact non-committal hits only make the problem worse but it can still discourage risk-taking on both sides lucario avoiding the loss of aura and the opponent avoiding aura and fundamentally camping is essentially just the natural conclusion of risk avoidance i've made a huge mistake it also means that a lot of the time the lucario player is either going to get to make proper use of their aura and kill their opponent very early or alternatively they'll lose the opportunity by dying early themselves in either case one player in these scenarios has been short-changed and remember whoever that was will typically walk away with a stronger impression of the moment the players i interviewed for this video are top representatives of some of the most textbook integral comeback mechanics in smash that their character's kits are heavily designed around and yet despite this they'd both prefer to see the roles of these mechanics reduced in order to get around some of these extremes i'd rather aura have less of an impact than it currently does just because i think it would make him more satisfying to play at like more percents rather than fun to play only at higher percents and it's not only like that for me like you learn to enjoy playing lucario even at lower percents or like with less aura once you play him enough but um i think or being less of a factor would just be cooler part of it that i think is a little weird is that they made the aura cap like super super high like they made it so you get max wara on a stock at 190 percent one thing i think would make aura a better mechanic is if they took away the stock difference multiplier so basically if you're lucario and you're up on your opponent buy a stock that takes away aura and i don't think that should be a thing and i think for the other way around like if you're lucario and you're losing to your opponent in stocks i don't think you should get more aura from that yeah people have asked before like if you could change you know max combat mechanic like what would you do i think he needs his comeback mechanic like he he needs ko punch without it he would be like absolute dog water more than he already is but um i also think that it's so unfun and so polarizing and so stupid little mac can kill people at like 20 30 for simply wanting to play the video game chao punch is very frustrating for both parties because the only way to get rid of it is to interact in most cases but interacting also means potentially dying at a very early percentage of the opponent and for mac there's god-awful amounts of n-lag on on chao punch so if you miss you're essentially dead so it's very frustrating for both people something like star punch would be better than an actual meter maybe if you parry a hit you get a star and then you use neutral b and it does damage and um knock back depending on how many stars you have but you know if you get hit you lose all your stars so that's the kind of gamble and it makes you have to think more it makes you have to fish and bait for certain you know parries or maybe hits to get those stars it makes you look for certain habits it adds more depth to the character and i think that would be really fun for both sides because you legitimately earned those stars instead of just getting hit or getting a hit and then having a comeback mechanic that kills at 20. their attitudes here make a lot of sense when you learn that possibly surprisingly their decisions to play these characters had absolutely nothing to do with comeback mechanics i started playing lucario in smash 4 after two got second at frostbite 2017 i really inspired me because it was just like a character that i hadn't really seen a lot he was doing a lot of things that i didn't really understand and i was like that stuff just looks cool to learn whether he had a horror or not it it doesn't really make a difference to me i just think his moves are really cool i think orris here's super sick you can like use a charge hitbox cancel into other moves do like cool combos he has really fun movement none of that has to do with aura it's all just stuff that's in his kit and that's what makes me really like playing him he's just fun to control fun to do combos with and you can be really creative i picked mac specifically because um after i unlocked all the characters i looked at the roster and i like i immediately recognized everybody on the roster just by name or by appearance except for little mac i didn't know his background i didn't know what game he came from whatever and he also looks weak like just canotically i mean like mario has like fireball powers and sonic is faster than the speed of sound and palutena is a literal goddess and and mac just is a dude with fists he just boxes and i'm like that that piqued my interest and then when i played him he felt simplistic just like as a casual newcomer you just felt simplistic like you just match attack that's pretty simplistic it's pretty cool and also against like bots and then world of light he was mad good with spirits i was like this is nice as time went on i got like better and i started playing more serious super smash brothers is an enormous game and yet its design space is so enormous that the pickings for a lot of the characters play styles are still fairly slim do you really really love the idea of playing a transforming character the idea of playing multiple characters and one is so intriguing that nothing else jumps at you in the same way well here you go take your pick that's what you got to work with what about a ninja a duo any of these ideas could be the irresistible hook that pulls you in and if that hook was say a ground-based boxer there's really no substitute for little mac and just because the boxer concept was what hooked you that doesn't mean you're not gonna have to deal with everything the character brings to the table no matter how potentially frustrating it may be lucario's interesting combo and movement techniques were the big hook for armadillo but lucario could also just as easily be someone's favorite pokemon your favorite pokemon or video game character in general leaves you with a choice of one i talk a lot about canon in super smash brothers which has turned out not to be a universally accepted way of looking at the game on my second channel mock rock talk for example i recently did a tier list looking at 100 smash candidates and the most common complaint i got was that i weighed their cannon abilities too heavily there are a number of reasons i prefer this approach but one of them is that there's less risk of a player being disappointed if their expectations for a character they enjoy aren't met take simon and richter belmont for example if you liked how the belmonts worked in castlevania it doesn't guarantee you'll like them in super smash brothers but the fact that they're zoners with clunky movement won't catch you off guard no character is perfect you might not like how weak their recovery is compared to castlevania's canon abilities for example but they're generally a pretty faithful translation and if you don't enjoy playing them in smash it'll be because you don't like how castlevania feels on a platform fighter not because they don't feel like they're from castlevania in the case of little mac or lucario though these comeback mechanics have been mostly or entirely pulled out of thin air for smash so forcing super armor or b reverse or punch out or pokemon fans to deal with something so polarizing if they want to use the characters is a risky move to put it lightly there will certainly be players who do enjoy using these elements but if you want lots of people to love your character design adding love it or hated ideas maybe giving them an unfairly rough start i think a better place to implement something like this would be along the lines of kazia's rage mechanic kazia comes from tekken a 3d fighting game with a conventional life bar so rage is obviously going to work a bit different between the series but it is something that exists in tekken rage has proved to be a contentious mechanic in khazia's home series as well but even if you're a tekken fan who doesn't love how rage works there you'll at least be prepared for the idea of his smash incarnation coming equipped with a comeback mechanic it also helps that out of all the comeback mechanics in smash this is one of the less polarizing ones it's good nobody's going to complain about a 10 damage boost on everything and it also unlocks rage drive a single use command grab that hits incredibly hard but this is actually not too far out of line with kazia's general balancing around explosive damage output and even outside of rage drive he already has access to multiple command grabs it's also able to be more resilient as a result of these other balancing factors after getting it at 100 damage kazia can lose it by being hit or by whiffing the move but there's leeway built into it it's not quite as strict as getting hit or whiffing it once it's the decidedly unrisky way to implement a comeback mechanic a slightly better tool on a character who is already extremely comeback heavy by nature and i'm not saying this is the power level that all combat mechanics need to stop at but i would argue that hewing a bit closer to this kind of template is more likely to result in a roster enjoyed by more of the player base especially for characters who don't naturally lend themselves to heavy polarization smash does have other comeback mechanics which fit more comfortably into the character's game plans and i think these have trended towards the more successful takes on the idea i'm particularly fond of the mechanics cloud and joker use because they're powerful without being instant wind mechanics and also have a substantial amount of counter play involved both in terms of activating them and making use of them i think the vendor design comeback mechanics do something along the lines of cloud's limit there's a timer like on limit so you are forced to use something so like limit you can actually camp out i think it's like 15 seconds and it goes away so if you're really scared of limit you don't have to approach it but if you feel like you can you know outplay it and go for it finishing touch kills to you earlier but it does like no damage and if you miss you are stuck in that lag for you know years generations it's fine i don't think limit is broken broken cloud does have a timer on his limit meter a huge change from smash 4 that makes the mechanic a lot more reasonable but the caveat to this is that cloud is already a fairly mobile character and a full limit meter makes him even more mobile so trying to camp him out until it goes away can potentially go very poorly for you alternatively it could also go very well and you could avoid some of his biggest threats it's a player in character matchup decision you need to be making in the heat of the moment the same can be said for joker and his rebellion gauge is even more interactive since attacking him at the wrong time will let him fill it faster but attacking him at the right time will burn the gauge back down so there's constant decision making at play here steve's diamond tools are a soft comeback mechanic that somewhat falls into this category since there are many ways to deny him the opportunity to get the necessary materials but generally speaking he's still gonna get at least one diamond in most matches and the only way to neutralize it after he does is to take his stock that's still a more favorable form of interaction compared to the likes of terry or lucario which have to be neutralized via stock taking and even these compare well to something like wario's waft this move strictly speaking doesn't really have much counter play involved at all it's a soft comeback mechanic that inevitably fills up and it even persists between stocks so killing wario fast enough to prevent waft ever coming online isn't realistic most of the time that said if i told you i hated everything about waft i'd be lying while it's not the most decision-heavy comeback mechanic to burn thanks to mostly being used in conjunction with a few stable combos interesting techniques and decisions about when to use it still can and do occur and waft also greatly contributes to wario being one of the most entertaining characters for me to watch while it can be seen as a bit of a cheap crutch to artificially create extra hype during a game there's no arguing that for better or worse making things more comeback heavy is a good way to please a crowd hold on hold on sephiroth is a comeback character koopa let's see is it gonna work out oh my god well maybe not as universally endearing there's also a lot to be said for the shake-ups to the game state that comeback mechanics can cause as lucario gets more aura in a match there's two ways the opponent will tend to play either the opponent will start getting really greedy trying to kill you as quickly as they can just to like get rid of your aura which me as a lucario player i obviously know you want to take my stock away right so i'm going to play more safe i'm going to look out for your kill moves or they're going to play more passive and scared because they know you have war and they don't want to like lose their stock super early it really just depends on the player and the character but most of the time it's probably better just to like play normal people will either camp or um some people actually play more aggressive to try to get ko punch like off of me because the way ko punch works a lot of people have the misconception of oh it's damage based or it's like oh just hit him what you do is you put back into tumble so the best way to get rid of max ko punch is to grab him and just throw him because most throws will put you in the tumble in this game but also you know to grab mac you have to approach someone like roy you know has to like get in on him to do something someone like ice climbers they gotta get in to actually get rid of it so it's a big problem for them someone like falco even falco fox like they have lasers but that's not gonna put back into tumble you know you gotta actually do something about it if it calls for it and like they're still playing really scared of chao punch and it looks like they're playing in a way that they're not comfortable with i just won't use ko punch so just keep going and like you said it's like a mind game or some kind of bait at this point because they're going to keep playing scared and chao bunch goes through shield too so if they have a shield habit i'll try to exploit that or if they have to jump at a hit stun thing that's good too because i can fake stuff together and it'll still work because they're trying to jump out of stuff yes camping is a possible outcome but even the thought process behind that decision is more nuanced than it may first appear and i've been going with the notion that camping is even inherently a negative thing this kind of decision making also exists on every character to some degree because modern smash titles has started incorporating the kind of universal hard comeback mechanic that's popped up more and more in modern fighting games giving everyone a boost to the knockback their attacks do as they take more damage this system has been dubbed rage by the playerbase yes a little bit confusing considering that kazuga now has a mechanic officially called rage but hey the universal version got there first as i alluded to at the beginning these kinds of systems are often derided in fighting games as a cheap way to artificially boost all his experienced players odds against someone more experienced a blue shell from mario kart in an environment that was never supposed to support blue shells and given smash's casual background that's only recently started truly paying attention to the competitive scene i doubt rage was immune from this design consideration however whether intentional or not i actually think this is a pretty well done universal comeback mechanic and there are some interesting nuances to it as well particularly the way it inherently benefits slower heavier characters more than fast light ones as the heavier ones will be able to survive long enough to take better advantage of it considering that the scales have historically been massively tipped in favor of lightweight characters in competitive smash anything to help level the playing field is worth at least some thought the self-balancing factor also scales relatively smoothly as percent climbs and the effect in ultimate isn't so extreme that even at hypersense it can single-handedly dominate the latter half of a stock in the same way it could in spanish 4. in this game the mechanic was 30 stronger which was admittedly somewhat excessive and that boost also applied to the parts of multi-hit attacks which were never intended to be used as launchers which could result in some pretty weird behavior this happened because multi-hit moves often have fixed knockback or knockback that doesn't scale up with your percent and is often really high knockback to make sure the opponent is dragged along with the attacker well at least that's the theory anyone who actually plays multi-hit characters in smash will tell you that reality doesn't always quite work out that way apply some heavy rage to this and there you go jank this is nothing new to the series for the record but rage definitely made it a lot worse ultimate removed rage from all fixed knockback hitboxes and his take on the mechanic is much more refined overall although it's still not perfect it's never effectively communicated to the players on screen during a match for example characters do get some angry effects that somewhat imply the idea but this only starts happening after they've taken 100 damage and rage actually starts kicking in a long time before that at 35 there's not really a proper way to learn how this mechanic actually works without looking it up from a third party source it also universally affects knockback on all moves including ones obviously meant to be used as combo starters meaning that it can counter-intuitively make stocks last longer in certain scenarios this could be mitigated by having rage only kick in on high knock back moves but i think the mechanic may be more effective if it scaled characters damage rather than knockback this issue would then be fixed and it would also turn the mechanic into more of a pure comeback system once your opponent is at the percentage to lose their stock inflicting additional damage becomes less impactful and the focus instead shifts to looking for kill moves and the higher the percent the more true this becomes this proposed take on rage would naturally scale by the gap in your percentages allowing you to bring your opponent up to your level and then smoothly losing effectiveness still all things considered given smash's casual origins one of the most casual oriented aspects of his design to slip into competitive play has been implemented surprisingly tastefully and while there are some character specific comeback mechanics which haven't been so lucky there have also been plenty of examples that were done very well i'm not going to say that any of them are perfect i would actually argue that limit breaks are slightly under emphasized in cloud's kit our stand is maybe just a bit too easy to access and making sephiroth so light and yet so reliant on an otherwise very fair comeback mechanic is a bit of a low blow but there's solid foundations regardless and these are just tuning issues and if we're reviewing comeback mechanics there actually is one more universal one which doesn't come up in conversation as often the invincibility a player gets when respawning which allows an opportunity to make a completely risk-free attack or read attempt on an opponent who has no choice but to run away this can be surprisingly powerful to the point where players often feel more comfortable retreating to the ledge rather than trying to avoid it on stage a position generally regarded as being very disadvantageous in regular gameplay the extensive invincibility time probably stems from being tuned for other more casual game modes with additional players and larger stages but in single battles it feels a bit excessive and i think ultimate missed an opportunity not to uniquely tune it for one-on-one fights the same way it started to do for other gameplay elements it's telling that essentially no other platform fighter has implemented this particular mechanic with anywhere near as heavy a hand as smash is done then again maybe being a bit heavy-handed was the point make no mistake smash has always been absurd and its comeback mechanics are very much in line with this okay some of them are bullsh they can be the fun kind of bull though and thinking of them as a series of unique challenges to overcome that no other game on the planet can offer that's probably going to be a good way to preserve your sanity honestly a problem with ultimate in general is like people not learning matches but i think if people are like struggling with comeback mechanics the best thing is to like learn everything you can about them like especially if you're fighting against them learn what they do learn how they affect the characters and learn like how to play around them comeback mechanics are probably always going to be a prominent part of this series and while there are some further refinements i'd like to see moving forward in the meantime what can we really do besides hit the lab hold on for dear life and smile in the face of adversity are you smiling i can't tell thanks for watching everyone and huge thanks once again to peanut and armadillo for sharing their insights please remember to check them out let me know your thoughts on comeback mechanics and take a look at my patreon youtube membership or twitch to vote on the next episode and for some other cool perks later people

Channel: MockRock

Views: 106,522

Keywords: Smash Ultimate, alpharad, Nintendo, little z, super smash bros ultimate, smash bros ultimate, tier list, esam, hungrybox, ssbu, alpharad deluxe, Nintendo Switch, Gameplay, nairo smash, nintendo memes, nintendo, smash ultimate tier list, smash ultimate tournament, smash ultimate best attacks, smash ultimate best moves, super smash bros ultimate best moves, super smash bros ultimate worst moves, kirby smash, smash bros, sora, steve, sephiroth, kazuya, kirby, little mac, lucario, terry, riddles

Id: DxCpDaZkWlg

Length: 25min 4sec (1504 seconds)

Published: Thu May 26 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/Coolcat127]

I think comeback mechanics are interesting because they also do the opposite of what’s intended, making comebacks against them extremely difficult. For example, when you’re a stock down against a Joker making a comeback is extremely difficult because all the damage you deal gives them Arsene and makes the comeback even harder for you.