The Competitive Failings of Smash Ultimate

wait hold on stop I know what you're about to do you're about to dislike the video on principle because you are tired of youtubers overextending and making definitive statements on things they know nothing about and if it's any consolation I'm inclined to agree with you so allow me to present you with this it's me at a smash ultimate tournament Here I am so young and handsome and full of hopes and dreams and Here I am getting wafted at 40 percent cool I still wonder set though I have been to a handful of smash ultimate tournaments I've been an occasional commentator and general community member since the game came out but I certainly haven't been around as much as I was during smash 4 which I started entering and competing in in January of 2016 and never really looked back until the game was dead and without trying to toot my own horn too much I think I got reasonably good at the game I never hit my goal of being power ranked top 15 in my country England in case you can tell and but I came close on a few occasions and considering that I'm ain't Falco for whatever reason I think that's pretty good Here I am so young and handsome and full of hopes and dreams and Here I am dying and losing grand finals because I tried to combo I only tell you all this because I want you to know that I know what I'm talking about I'm not just some schmuck trying to get views I am some schmuck trying to hate on your favorite game jokes aside don't miss read the title I'm not trying to say that Smosh ultimate is a failure it clearly isn't I'm instead going to talk about where I find it deeply disappointing as a competitive game if I'm sat here analyzing smash ultimate as a party game as a casual game really as anything other than a competitive fighting game it's unbelievable far and away the best in the series the level of content that is in this game should literally not be possible and I mean this with no exaggeration when I say that this is the kind of smash game that I have literally dreamt of okay I'm not shamed with me when my actual dad kink a rule was revealed for the game I cried a little bit okay sure it's sad to see trophies go and world of light is a bit of an underwhelming single-player mode but you get why things had to be this way in terms of sheer numbers this roster is unprecedented and all of the new characters added into the game are so caught not you the amount of music and stages in the game hell even the UI and menus are a huge step up from Smash Ball but that's not what we're talking about today and unfortunately for me personally as far as smash ultimate as a competitive game goes it's possibly the single most disappointing experience I've ever had with any game when ultimate was revealed I was so excited it was honestly like being a kid at Christmas again I was counting down the days to release time was moving so slowly for months on end while I waited for this game and when I played it for the first few months I tried to like it so much I've never wanted to like a game as much as this one but sadly as a competitive game I think it has some major flaws that not enough people are talking about so I'm gonna talk about them it's time to look into things too much [Music] before I really get into the meat of this video there's a few things that I want to make clear so firstly I am aware that this video by concept alone is gonna be very contentious I would politely ask that you save any disagreements or any dislikes until you've seen the whole video there is a huge part of me that isn't going to enjoy making this video because when I was a tournament competitor in smash 4 we enjoyed this kind of stuff all the time people criticizing our game hating on it generally we had to deal with tons of elitism I really don't want this video to come off like I am being one of those guys this is intended to be a reasonably nuanced and even-handed critique of ultimate finally I'm about to talk about some pretty complicated stuff if you've never played a smash game competitively or a fighting game competitively then this first section might make your head spin a little bit I know I said earlier but I know what I'm talking about but this might be the part where I make a couple of mistakes and if that's the case then I will either correct myself in the comments or on screen I will clearly communicate when a correction needs to be made because I've had to do a lot of research in this video I've done a lot of conferring with my good friend Scott you can find that Twitter here and I will put it in the description below there are a lot smarter about the game than I am and I basically had to use them as like a fact checker but then there's only so many questions you can ask before you feel like enough of the nuisance there just kind of look stuff up for yourself so don't blame them when I mess stuff up which I probably will here's a really funny clip of them dying alright it's finally time to talk about the single biggest contributing factor to my general apathy for a competitive smash ultimate control in any game in which you will be pushing a bunch of different buttons in rapid succession control is extremely important if you listen to almost any game design discussion around say platformers you will hear talk of how control is the single most important of things a male in a platformer you will probably hear the same thing about fighting games and the first problem occurs here because smash is both of these things and it controls really quite badly smash ultima is the fastest and most aggressive smash game since melee which is lauded as the competitive peak of the smash series because of its aggressive and speed as well as it's ridiculous ceiling for technical optimization unfortunately on top of being the fastest and most aggressive games in smelly smash Omer is the clunkiest and most unintuitive feeling smash game ever speed does not equal fluidity if you don't know what the phrase game feel means well you do now because it's the most self-explanatory thing since oranges they're orange smash Ultima as far as I'm concerned has all the game feel of trying to push something on wheels on like a really stony path how many times have you been playing smash Ultima and made an input and it seems like the game just does something completely different or it forces you to do something that you never even input in the first place if like most people your answer is a lot then it's likely due to one of two things the first thing being at the buffer system and this is where as I say things might get a little bit complicated almost every conventional fighting game has what's called a buffer system so smash ultimate has a buffer window of nine frames what this means is that if you perform an action and then within nine frames before that action ends you input another action the game should automatically perform that action for you I'm not an expert but I would assume that buffer systems are put in place to help players perform complicated inputs combos and strings whilst still maintaining some level of accessibility it basically means that players don't have to do everything frame perfectly so the buffer system that I've just explained is what I'm going to call for the purposes of this video a traditional buffer you get a certain window of a few frames perform an action within that window and then the game should do that for you automatically as soon as it is able here's the thing this is not the only kind of buffering that smash ultimate has it also has what's called a hold buffer which is a different way to effectively queue up your moves so that the game automatically does it as soon as it can to my understanding the way that the hold buffer works in the smash ultimate is that if you hold the input for an action at any time while another action is happening as long as you're still holding the input for that action within three frames of the other coming out it should work I don't know how common it is for other fighting games to have a hold buffer or for them to have both the traditional buffer that I talked about earlier and hold buffer but I do know that a smash shortener is the first smash game ever to have hold buffer now having both kinds of buffering by itself is not exactly a huge issue the biggest problem caused by a hold buffer is how easy it is for the game to mistakenly input a roll or a spot dodge when you hold the shield button in any direction in the air there's a guy called DJ dead DJ Ted sorry I don't have a nickname but he did a really really great video on ultimates buffering system his section on the hold buffer and dodge buffering will probably explain this problem better than I ever could the next feature I want to discuss is how shield and dodge buffering is handled in Smash for a period of four hop double jump air dodge and continue to hold the button used to air dodge and then hold either down left or right and continue to do so as you land all that will happen is that your field will pop up as soon as you land and your shield will be tilted towards the direction you are holding nothing too unexpected in Smash Ultimates if you were to follow the same procedure of inputs you fall off to Apex then double jump do an O to air dodge immediately and continue holding the Dodge button then hold a direction immediately after you neutral your dodge and then land you will find that you would do a roll or spot dodge instead even if you start to hold the Dodge or shield button more than a couple of seconds earlier this is just one of many examples of how insanely large the buffer window is for dodging it's basically infinite the real problem in my opinion is how the games buffer systems interact with a new mechanic that was introduced in Ultimate this one dude short hop attacks by pressing the e bun and jump at any time the saddest thing about the ez short hop aerial mechanic is that it was clearly implemented with good intentions Sakurai and the design team clearly recognized the importance of short hop aerials across all smash games competitively and they wanted to make it easier for everyone to do unfortunately by doing so they have greatly hampered the game's control so in Smash owner only one action can be buffered at a time and if you happen to buffer multiple actions then the game needs some way of deciding which action it will perform in brawl you could buffer multiple actions and the game would perform them all at the same time which as you can imagine create some pretty wacky tech and in smash 4 much like Ultima you could only buffer one action at a time but the game would choose the most recent action that you buffered to perform Ultima is a bit different in this regard ultimate chooses which Muffit action it performs via this thing called the order of priority which I've realized while recording audio for this video spells out OOP which is extremely appropriate for I'm about to explain to you OOP as you can probably infer from the name this is a list of actions that you can buffer in order of priority but here's the weird part chilling out right at the very top of the order of priority list is short hop aerial which probably raises a lot of questions I just said the only one action can be buffered in smash ultimate time and a short hop aerial is very clearly a combination of two actions it's a jump and an attack so you can't buffer - grabs or - attacks or other stuff like that that is technically two actions but you can buffer short hop aerial it's the exception to the rule because it's treated by the game's buffer system like it's one action I can only assume that this is because like I said earlier Sakurai and the design team wanted to make sure up area was easier for everyone to do so on the order of prayer is list short hop aerial is higher than jump and attack are as respective actions and you know what this means right it means you can't buffer full hop aerials because your buffer a jump see that your jump is coming out go to buffer and attack and the game will go Oh attack and a jump within a reasonable amount of time of each other sure up aerial coming right up completely regardless of how hard you're pushing the jump button and how long you're holding it for and this is a really big problem whilst not as universally important as short hop aerials full hop aerials are still a massive part of the game use greninja as an example okay I main greninja when the game first came out and greninja is a great example of everything wrong with the game's control system so if greninja hits most characters with a Down till about 120 to 130 percent it should true combo into a full hop forward air for a kill the window is generally pretty tight but if you're precise it should always work however I cannot buffer that full hop for there if I try to do so the game would instead give me a shot up for them it's not exactly a one frame window I don't how much it is but it's very precise as is and now the game is demanding even more from you and not in a cool skill intensive way but in a frustrating inconsistent why is the only thing I'm fighting in this game the controllers kind of way for hot areas are crucial in juggling pressure in high places reading your opponent's jumps they are crucial in so many ways but because of the way that the buffer system interacts with the easy shot up aerial mechanic it literally just doesn't even function in these specific moments of gameplay to my knowledge there are some fighting games out there that don't have a traditional buffer system and they're pretty skill intensive for it because the lack of a buffer is consistent players have been able to work with that and be as precise as the game asks them to smash ultima is on a totally different level for about 75% of the game it has the most generous buffer system of any smash game to a fault it literally creates extra problems but then there's another 25% of the game where it just doesn't work that is not the cool kind of precision that a game can expect from you but wait there's more did you know that for whatever reason whenever you buffer a short hop area whether intentionally or not the game decides which area you perform not based on the direction that your directional stick was facing when you buffered the move bar on the direction that your directional stick was facing when the move comes out so let's say that your snake and you've just taken a hit on your shield you're probably going to use down air as you're out of field option assuming that you're playing on tilt stick your input is simply jump and down on the c-stick however you'd likely start holding forward on the directional stick so that you can drift forward with set down air and as a result you get forward air there's a lot of cases where someone doesn't need to drift in any direction with their aerial so they leave their directional stick in the neutral position and regardless of which direction they push on the c-stick they get given neutral air this is why a lot of people complain about accidental and missing put neutral airs in this game and why they say that the c-stick outright doesn't work because yeah in a lot of cases it just doesn't do you see how this makes no sense and is so unintuitive a fighting game or a platformer wherever you want to call this game should not control like this many people speculate that this is either just bug or a big design oversight it obviously needs to be changed same thing with the whole shoe hop aerial mechanic thing I'm not saying remove it from the game entirely because I'm sure it helps quite a lot of people perform short of aerials more consistently a very simple and elegant change that a lot of people have suggested is to just give us the ability to turn it off this would be huge for the games buffer system and general feel it's not exactly all bad some of these things have come together to help create a tack canceling which is a pretty cool tech and hold buffer is occasionally quite useful but for the most part it's a huge blight on the way that the game controls like I say it just feels like you're fighting against the game to make it do what you want all the time there are quite a few little workarounds to a lot of the issues that I've just brought up and some people would say hey you know these things are problems but you can just get used to them and you know what they'd be right I could just get used to them I could get used to having a peg leg I could get used to [ __ ] out of my mouth it wouldn't be remotely fun or enjoyable but I could get used to it there's so many things that I don't even have the time to touch on in this video about how like the new buffer system also makes dropping through platforms really unnecessarily hard and it just complicates so many basic actions that were so easy to perform in smash 4 and even in previous games there's tons of other great videos on the buffering system of smash ultimate by people like Scarfo and DJ third Ted sorry wherever it is I'm gonna link them and every other video I use footage of in the description as I always do because I have other things that I want to talk about and they explain it in much more depth than I do it's a real shame they couldn't have just replaced the buffer system with a buffet system right so you you could just you could eat all you want instead of having smash ultimate do the wrong input for you look I spent like half an hour trying to row a [ __ ] buffet system joke Oh also I consulted a lot with my good friend GP for the control section of this video here's a funny clip of him dying oh alright now let's talk about point 2 this is design and balance with control I'm pretty sure I could argue that smash4 was an objectively better game and it's a large part of the reason that I significantly prefer it as a competitive game over Altman whereas when it comes to design and balance I'm not even gonna try and pretend like smash Ford did it bare right like I love smash 4 but it was definitely quite the mess as far as design and balance is concerned there was almost always some ridiculous top-tier completely dominating the mirror and towards the end of the game it was worse than it ever been then you combine that with a rage which for those who don't know was a mechanic where you did dramatically more knock-back based on how much damage you've taken you had characters like Bayonetta Rosalina zero suit just killing people off the topic absolutely absurd the sense with moves that just didn't make any sense whatsoever yeah it was bad and the way the ultimate handles rage is probably the single biggest piece of credit I can give it I think it handles rage pretty much perfectly actually rage is still in the game but it's toned down significantly to the point where it very rarely feels like you got cheated when you die you very rarely die at completely unreasonable percents generally the game feels a lot more fair smash Ultimates DLC has not even finished releasing yet at the time of the recording of this video and it's already a much better balanced game than smash forwards by the end of its lifespan which when you consider how much larger the roster is by comparison is an extremely impressive feat and definitely something that is worthy of praise this game has about 80 playable characters and a lot of them do feel reasonably viable fun fact I was so confident that snake would not be coming back in the next smash game because of all the Kojima Konami controversy that I made a bet with my friend that if snake came back in the next smash game I would literally eat my own [ __ ] so you can imagine my reaction when he popped up in the e3 everyone is here trailer thing obviously I am still yet to eat my own [ __ ] but I am a YouTube channel with under a thousand subscribers so I basically eat [ __ ] every day there's not one sole character at the top completely dominating the meta game and there hasn't really been one at all since the game came out which is good there's still time for it to improve even further so yeah good stuff there however the question we need to ask ourselves is these good characters how cool and interesting are they and unfortunately my answer to that would be not very almost every viable character in Ultima is viable for one of two reasons because they have one or two ridiculous all-purpose moves that they can use in almost every scenario or because they have some silly gimmick attached to them that makes them powerful in an over centralized way but not in a balanced or interesting way and completely changes to face of the game when it comes into play palutena Ike and Miss The Game and Watch are all great examples of that first category pal attainers neutral air is one of the most egregious moves ever conceived in a smash game some palutena players will try and tell you that it's not even her best aerial and they might be right but no other move in the game is this good in this many situations it can be used in neutral it's a great edge guarding tour because of how many active frames it has and for the same reasons it's also very good fun ledge trapping it combos into itself its generous hitbox size means it's a viable anti-air tool it kills reasonably early it can walk your dog it can get you a date and it can tuck you in bed at night and it will give you a little kiss on the forehead and say it's okay you don't have to think characters such as Joker and to a lesser extent warrior are all great examples of that second category Joker is a below-average character for the entire game and then he summons arson and just becomes ludicrously broken to the point where a lot of players have just had to resort to running away in camping him for the duration Wario waft is well you know the viable characters in ultimate that don't fall into either of these categories are actually reasonably cool unfortunately there's like three of them before I carry on I just want to intrude this point real quick and say that I am absolutely not trying to say that this is a smash on the exclusive problem this has been a problem in every smash game it was significantly worse with characters in brawl in smash 4 if I thought that the design and balance of the characters in ultimate was the only problem I wouldn't even made this video in the first place right smash 4 I loved smash 4 you know smash 4 is my baby but I would never try and defend its characters from a design and balance perspective I mean beyond oppressive top tier is killing you as sub 30% you also have characters like DK and bowser who weren't good at all and then they got buff to have grabbed confirms and they were pretty much only good because they could grab you a lot and do stupid damage off of that and it was the most like one-dimensional thing ever i loved it they were really fun to play us because they controlled well but yeah i would never try and defend them from a design and balance perspective or Lucario or luigi Ultimates top tiers probably wouldn't seem so boring in 1 dimensional if the meta was shifting a little more often and we regularly saw new contenders rise up in the meta game to challenge them the design team have clearly been making a concerned effort to balance the game Picchu and Olimar were two pretty ridiculous characters who were nerfed accordingly and I think now sit at a pretty reasonable place in the meta game but I think it's fair to say that we'd all rather see characters get buffed the nerfed characters have been buffed but they've generally meant nothing and a lot of the buffs given to low tier characters have been outright silly instead of fixing some of these characters fundamental flaws the game's patches have only improved what was already good about previously weak characters and not addressed anything meaningful donkey kong can't land his disadvantaged state is awful and almost none of his moves are safe on here but his forward tilt one of his best moves already now goes a little bit further so you're welcome dr. mario has horrendous airspeed and coupled with his absolutely pitiful recovery he struggles to make it back to stage from almost any meaningful distance off stage he doesn't have the mobility or maneuverability to take advantage of his strong attacks so your fixes up B for us right Nintendo no no that's not what I meant don't make it stronger when it dr. Mario mean wins Evo 2023 solely by pushing up B and killing his opponent at 30% every time he touches his shield I'll have to eat my words five years later in Tendo we'll have finally created a new top tier character in Smash Ultima and he will be just as one-dimensional and over centralized as a majority of the others because not only other buffs the patches are bringing us not working and not changing anything meaningful about the meta game but they're generally the wrong buffs if a lot of the characters Nintendo have tried to buff actually do end up getting better than they are poised to become gimmicky one or two button messes like a lot of the currently viable characters much like smash 4 being an absolute travesty of design is not limited to being a good character meet Luigi he's bad at almost everything but if he grabs you once you might just died at zero which encourages players to not fight him and to just camp and run away meet hero okay a sick part of me actually thinks that this character is really cool but don't tell anyone I obviously don't mean to imply that I think no character should have any flaws it's okay and it makes for some very interesting characters Smash Ball chic by the end of the met game was a really cool and interesting character because she had a blatant weakness in her struggle to kill fish she was so good at everything else it's okay for characters like cloud and dr. Mario to have bad recoveries if they're strong enough in other areas to compensate but also no character should ever have a move like this or like this help him the thing is that the dev team have shown that they can make really graceful and appropriate changes to a character when necessary I think current pokemon trainer is a really cool character and one of the most well designed good characters in ultimate most people would probably say that pokemon trainer is around high-tier maybe debatably top-tier they haven't really moved much on the tier list since the game came out but they have had significant changes in the early days of the metagame pokemon trainer was pretty much exclusively good because of Ivysaur squirtle was okay but sending out Charizard was like a death sentence Ivysaur was just so much better than the other two he had a projectile he had range he had kill confirms he had everything so the dev team did something really interesting they simply nerfed IV saw and buffed Charizard making the character pretty much the same level of viability that they were before but also a much more well-rounded and interesting character as a result and that's great in my opinion a near-perfect change if the dev team ever changed Joker I really hope that they don't just nerf the character outright it would be much more interesting and elegant in my opinion to just nerf our sin and buff based Joker to make the character like I said more interesting and less over centralized on this one factor of their gameplay I understand why the dev team are being a bit more conservative with their patches this time around because they don't want another smash for where some patches just kind of throw the meta game into haywire a little bit I get it but at the same time special for you were frequently seeing top players forced to pick up and try out new characters and counter picks and things stayed interesting if a bit messy but as I move away from characters and start to talk about some of the more fundamental changes to the mechanics I will reiterate that the design and balance of the characters by itself is not a huge problem I would never have made this video if that was the only problem and I don't think it's just that that contributes to the game in my opinion being a lot more boring than smash four as a competitive game I want to first start off by saying that smash autumn that makes quite a lot of good changes that I quite like the removal of the random untechnical spin animation is pretty much an objectively good change I like that you can't Tek grounded spikes in this game it makes a lot of spiking down airs and borders that were previously only really good off stage if you want to try and style and your opponent viable on stage as well as like a combo star I would have no issue with roles getting laggy er if you use them excessively if the whole buffer didn't make it so easy to accidently buffer a roll much like the easy shoe hop aerial mechanic a lot of the changes made an ultimate were clearly made with good intentions to give the players what they wanted the fastest and most aggressive game since Mele and in order to achieve this quite a lot of changes were made to shields so in every previous game apart from melee dropping your shield took seven frames this kind of made it so that bringing up your shield and generally playing defensively wasn't really much of a commitment dropping shield in melee takes a whopping 15 frames and Ultimates it's a pretty nice sweet spot between all of these at 11 frames again not a problem in and of itself but then you add in the increased shield damage and shield stun that most moves in the game do combine it with the game's finicky buffer system and you have dilemmas like snakes up till when snake up tilts your shield you take an immense amount of shield damage and shields done and get pushed back a bit so almost no character is going to be able to grab snake for this you're probably gonna have to buffer an area without a shield but because you're stuck in shield stun for so long well that's a lot of time to change the direction of your directional stick in the hopes that you'll drift into him with your aerial of choice that's a hell of a lot of time for the game's buffer system to completely misinterpret what you want to do yet another basic action that was significantly easier in previous smash games that is now made way harder by almost control system again I get why shields were nerfed and why they are this way in Ultima because people want less defensive play and I agree with these changes if the mechanic that was seemingly intended to combat the weakness of shields parrying was really worth it parrying in my opinion is a great mechanic in concept but it just doesn't really do enough does it it's really good for countering an obvious close-range attack and getting a huge punish for it but what about multi hip moves that can completely trip you up what about projectiles parrying does nothing about projectiles the ineffectiveness of parrying combined with the weakness of shields is probably wise owners and projectile characters like Robin Pac Man are better than ever in this game which is something that people seem to dislike quite a lot a lot of people have suggested making parrying reflect projectiles which i think would be a great change the final thing I'll say about shields is that initially I also really liked the change that you can no longer run through your opponent's shield I always found that pretty frustrating to deal with and quite inconsistent in smash war but I've since learned that it was based on characters ground speed which in a way is kind of a shadow buff to the already good fast characters but it opened up a lot more options and it made neutral feel pretty interesting and diverse yet again it's the combination of these shield issues with another core issue of the games mechanics that contributes to it being a lot less interesting than other smash games in my opinion so let's talk about movement or the lack thereof I feel like people often mistake speed and aggression for style I don't think smash ultimate is anywhere near as stylish a game as smash for words even though Smash Ball was a lot slower and in the case of quite a few matchups quite a lot more defensive less first just a dress perfect pivot I loved perfect pivot I used perfect over all the time in Smash Ball if you didn't know what it was it was this really sick movement option where you flick the directional stick and you do like a tiny little sidestep out of the way and face the opposite direction and you could combine this with tilts for some really cool stuff really cool expressive movement it opened up so many options without feeling oppressive and over tuned it wasn't the easiest things to do in the world but it was easy enough much like running through shields smash ultimate does not have perfect pivoting which is a big loss to the games movement but it does try and implement - dancing like Mele had which would be pretty cool if it worked the same part of Smash Ultimates - and run mechanics are quite a lot more restrictive than melees and as a result it's really just nowhere near as good it's like a fringe of in some cases ultimate does provide players with the ability to do tilts jabs and other attacks directly out of a - which is pretty cool and it makes way for PIPA canceling which is a pretty cool tech in my opinion it's where you flick the directional stick back and forth while inputting an attack on the c-stick and you get like an extra little slide on it but your initial - before you break into an outright run is really quite short in this game and so I don't think it's quite as applicable as the design is intended between the lack of ability to run through your opponent's shield a lack of perfect pivot the relative ineffectiveness of - dancing and the limited nature of tilts and attacks out of it - I think that most of the time smash Ultimates neutral ends up looking more or less like this players just kind of run back and forth near each other in a straight line for a while until one decides to go in with their best aerial to see if they get lucky in with the button lottery its aggressive and usually fast-paced sure but I don't think that necessarily equal is interesting or stylish I don't really feel like I hear anyone else saying this but I can't help but feel the ultimate actually gives us less options than the previous smash games which in my opinion results in this neutral game that kind of looks like two goats just running each other in a straight line and biting horns and because of this kind of cocktail of changes that has mostly taken options away from players I think this is a really unexpressive smash game if you compare two high level players playing the same high or top-tier character I don't feel like you often see much difference in their play and not for any fault of their own they're just doing what's optimal as the character for in smash 4 if you had both say mister R and void play default color Sheik and there was no way of seeing their tags so you couldn't tell who is playing I feel like I would still be able to tell who is playing through their play there would be marked differences in the way that they play the game because the game has enough options and opportunities for expression for them to be different they implement different movement options and different tech and the game controls fluidly enough for them to do exactly what they want all the time same if you compared Larry Lars Fox with lights Fox I feel like there were clear differences in their gameplay that they were able to express through the mechanics and I don't think there's anywhere near as much space for that in Altima there's less tech there's less movement options and it seems like the most effective tactic is to just put your best move on shield and space it as best you can and see what directional air dodges are something that people have wanted back in smash since smelly and the design team clearly heard their cries and put them back in that's pretty cool and it certainly be fair to say that air dodging was quite a bit too powerful in smash for you could do it as many times as you want in the air and just kind of spam it so I like that you can only do one directional air dose before landing and they have tons of end lag unfortunately much like the way that a lot of this games fundamental mechanic changes have made the games neutral a lot less interesting I also think that the addition of directional air dodging has only really served to make the game to barrage a lot less interesting because air dodge reads were some of the coolest and most skill intensive things in Smash Ball so cool when someone read and punished an air dodge in Smash 4 you felt big it was like the player knew that they are in their opponent's head and it enabled so many sick plays and yet again because of this change and because players can potentially air dodge in so many different directions it's almost impossible to read and punish consistently and as a result you see a lot less cool stuff I think finally ultimate has more moves than ever that buried you a mechanic that basically forces you to mash as hard as humanly possible so that you can escape before you eat a huge punish yes there are alternative and more effective ways of mashing to escape than mashing the face buttons on your controller fart for players who don't know that yet or don't feel like completely destroying the directional stick this means the buffer system has an absolute field day with picking random [ __ ] that you don't want it to do to perform as soon as you escape probably causing you to eat another even huger punish than you would have taken in the first place if you just let yourself stay buried not exactly fun and a kind of wish they would all go away now then the last segment of this video is going to be significantly shorter than the previous two this is online [Music] it sucks I don't have any stats or facts or statistics for this section if you've played smash autumn online then you know exactly what I'm talking about the online in this game sucks if you can believe it it was worse before because if you jumped on to quit play looking for a match with a competitive rule set as in no items Omega or battlefield variant no smash meter and all that stuff one on one sometimes you could still randomly just be thrown into a free-for-all with other players with smash meter and items on a non tournament legal stage you could literally just not be given what you specifically searched for thankfully they seemed to have at least fixed that problem but smash almost Wi-Fi still remains pre-or connections are just very rarely ever good on quick player and if they ever are then you combine that with the buffer system which you might notice keeps coming back over the course of this video wonder why that is and the game still just kind of feels pretty awful regardless of how good your connection is battle arenas are pretty cool but again at their very best connection wise the game still just doesn't feel good I didn't even know what net code was before ultimate came out but I do now because I've specifically heard it in reference to how bad smash Ultimates supposedly is I assume and have seen a lot of speculation online that this is mainly really to do with Nintendo's awful online service that hasn't been good since the start still isn't good and continues to fail games like smash on they're basically if you can't attend tournaments all the time and you're looking primarily to improve over Wi-Fi well good luck on fighting the world's most uphill Bell I actually can't believe I'm saying this but I think smash for Wi-Fi was better if it wasn't then it felt better because you didn't have to contend with Wi-Fi in combination with awful control there it is again oh I have to admit I did not think I would be here for this long if you don't mind hearing me out I have just a couple more things to say before I go firstly I hate doing all this call-to-action [ __ ] because it feels so cheesy and see-through but more than ever I would really appreciate your likes or comments or shares wherever it is on this video for one thing because I worked way harder on this video than anything else I've ever done on the channel it took me way longer to do than even the pokemon black and white video but also as I kind of hinted at earlier in the video I'm pretty sure that this video is gonna attract a lot of hostility and hate because of the subject matter and because I'm criticizing something that a lot of people really like too which I would say I didn't really want to make this video either I did and I didn't you know I'm really passionate about this series smash 4 when I was competing in it and I was playing it competitively and hanging out with the community and going to events it honestly got me out of some pretty dark times in my life so to see its sequel in a competitive sense to be such a bitter disappointment in my opinion obviously got me pretty down but the thing is that there is still a lot of time for this game to improve and frankly I don't think enough people are giving honest genuine criticisms at this game people either don't want to hear it because they're sick of smash games catching heat which I get or they're just kind of trashing on it senselessly you know and I think we need to find a good middle ground if we're to have any hope of Nintendo noticing our criticisms and addressing them so yeah any support you can give will be greatly appreciated I guess I'll go ahead and plug the patreon again I really am doing some pretty cool stuff and the patreon it would be worth your money I am optimistic about the future of this game I think that it has so much potential it just needs a few important tweaks that I'm worried Nintendo might not give it but if they do it can seriously be so amazing just look at this game man look at the content and the way it looks look at how much potential there is to be by far the best smash game ever in both a casual and competitive sense I just want it to be better I know it can be and I really really hope it gets there and with that I am finally done and I will speak to you again soon [Music]

Channel: Fudj

Views: 452,227

Keywords: Fudj, Super Smash Bros, SSBU, Nintendo, Switch, Smash Ultimate, The Competitive Failings of Smash Ultimate, What's Wrong With Smash Ultimate?, Why Smash Ultimate Is Flawed, Smash Ultimate's Flaws, Smash Ultimate Is Flawed, Melee, Smash 4, Smash Ultimate Buffering, Why Does Smash Ultimate Control So Bad?, Smash Bros Ultimate Rant, Smash Ultimate Short Hop Macro, Why Is Online So Bad In Smash Ultimate?, Smash Ultimate Is Disappointing, Smash Ultimate Disappointment, Ultimate Buffer

Id: VoMam_nH_54

Length: 37min 32sec (2252 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 25 2020