The Esport Nintendo Abandoned - What Happened To ARMS?

[Music] the world of fighting games is almost as old as video game arcades themselves fans that have been with the genre from the beginning have been duking it out with each other using the same joystick and 6 to 8 button layout for over 30 years and even the most open-minded among them can still be set in their ways the existence of fight sticks in and of itself speaks to this point so when new ips come along and try to change up the fighting game formula it's understandable when they aren't met with the warmest of receptions for many people in the fgc there's a mentality that if you stray outside the box of traditional 2d or 3d fighters your game doesn't belong most arena fighters such as naruto ninja storm and dragon ball z budokai fall into this category the one outstanding exception to this has always been smash which due to its sheer popularity has begrudgingly been brought into the fold it was against this backdrop that nintendo in 2017 launched their second original fighting game a wacky brightly colored boxing game that invites players to rethink everything they thought they knew about fighting games this is arms arms was released in june of 2017 mere months after the release of the nintendo switch upon its release it was met with favorable reviews and impressive sales but there was always something off about the reception many journalists likened arms to wii sports boxing a casual party game that was included with the original wii console that was meant to showcase the motion controls unique to the system this in addition to the marketing campaign which emphasized motion controls led to the general perception that this was just another casual nintendo game more akin to a tech demo than anything else however the truth is a bit more nuanced at its core arms is a fighting game that's incredibly easy to learn but hard to master when you play arms there's ultimately only three attacks you need to worry about punches grabs and rush attacks and while this may seem overly simplistic arms has a lot going on in its gameplay that makes those three attacks more than sufficient in order to understand what makes arms different from normal fighters you have to understand how your typical fighting game is broken down in a game like street fighter you have a two-dimensional plane with easily perceptible distances between players you can jump crouch walk and dash in order to control the space between you and your opponent while throwing out various punches kicks and special moves like the famous hadouken in order to damage your opponent this all may seem rudimentary but it's important to cover because in a lot of ways arms throws all of that out the window first arms is a 3d projectile arena fighter inspired by the likes of virtual on and gundam verses as in these games you can move left right up or down all from a third person perspective keeping an eye on your opponent at all times as opposed to seeing the whole map like in most other fighters arms also includes a variety of environmental factors like trampolines and moving platforms that force players to really interact with the three-dimensional space however when it comes to combat arms differs greatly from other games forming a kind of hybrid between projectile and melee combat instead of your typical punches the characters in arms have springs or coils where their arms should be at the end of each of these springs is a custom boxing glove which is launched like a projectile before returning to the character each glove has its own abilities weight and on-hit effects so while each character may have passive traits or abilities unique to them like in other games it's in their choice of weapon that players really decide how they want to play some players might favor smaller or quicker arms that allow you to sneak in hits after most of your attack has been rebuffed some want heavier arms that can't be knocked out of the air like their lighter counterparts but no matter what you prefer you ultimately have to be willing to adjust depending on what your opponent plays you won't get anywhere if every attack is being blocked by a shield arm your ability to understand and adapt to your opponent's game plan and its weaknesses while also choosing arms that either support your own character's strengths or shore up their weaknesses is at its core what makes arm's metagame so intricate despite public sentiment arms has got a lot more going for it than people originally gave it credit for and the dreaded motion controls that scared most competitive players off well it turns out that they're entirely optional game pads are not only supported but are the preferred control layout for many high level players despite this many mines had already been made up before the game had even launched it wasn't until the pre-release tournament where eager fans would get their first look at what arms could be ladies and gentlemen in the nintendo booth and watching at home welcome to the 2017 arms open invitational despite finally getting a showcase of the potential that arms had as a competitive fighter players and teos found that there were certain challenges that came with trying to organize competitive arms events yeah most of the tournaments they had were over wifi like 2gg held one of the first big arms tournaments online with like 700 people in it and there's no way to control the quality of that many people and then you had people like shrimps who were part of this grassroots scene who starting up his stream for arms was hosting a bunch of these online tournaments uh he hosted fight club shrimp's bowl ramen bowl he hosted all these different tournaments for the arms community and those things like those just started popping up all over the place i wonder if that you know hurt the community a little bit not having that offline human the human interaction kind of thing going on there however transitioning offline didn't prove to be any easier a lot of it was going over to like other games and be like hey here's this game called arms it's really really cool it's really really quirky as long as it doesn't interfere with what you've got going on like with your other games that you're competing in you should totally check it out and it was really dragging some people over eventually like a lot of them liked it the retention probably wasn't as high because it was a pretty quirky game and you know the crowd was young but that was the early part of it was just getting other people to come over and at least you know dip their toe in it to see if they'd like it and have a little bit of fun beyond the tech issues and recruitment issues the arms community also had to contend with a fundamental disagreement among players on how to compete in the game at launch arms didn't contain a tournament mode or any kind of streamlined system for land competitions which gave rise to another major problem if each match was going to be played in a normal versus mode then a decision had to be made about what kind of arms were going to be allowed for tournament use i came from a smash background right and we'd had our own issues with customs and implementation thereof within our community and so i argued for defaults there were large components of argument for customs as well so it was a big community divide in some ways that shifted not only the metagame but the participants and it was i think one of the the central turning points of the game as a whole each character comes with three different default arms unlocked these arms vary in usefulness from the downright broken to the absolutely useless at times this would create situations where a character like helix with solid abilities would be undone by their lack of good arms choices the other school of thought was that all arms should be unlocked allowing players to field any combination of arms that they want in order to best support their character and desired playstyle the downside to this was that in the absence of a tournament mode it fell to to's to unlock every arm for every character on every switch system they had at a tournament while there were workarounds to this such as having competitors bring their own consoles the burden on to's was uncharacteristically high it became a point of contention because especially in st louis people like well i don't want to come if i can't play all my customs and i'm like well if you bring your own switch and we get everyone to commit to bringing their own switch we'd probably do it they said well i don't want to bring my own switch i'm like ah i mean i have four people committing to bringing their relatively still not highly bought switch console and these very hyper specific pool of people that also bought arms it became like a big thing it was it was very very difficult to effectively run a tournament with the way the game was originally set up this fundamental disagreement divided the arms community in two and created a barrier of entry into the game that some found insurmountable the idea that to get into competitive arms you needed to unlock every custom arm for every character is pretty daunting but while the debate between default and custom arms raged anyone who wanted to improve had no idea which path to take committing to learning strategies and matchup knowledge is difficult enough but not knowing whether that knowledge could be rendered useless if the community decides to go a different way could be infuriating to say the least this uncertainty during the early days of arms dealt a crushing blow to the fledgling scene that wouldn't see resolution until the following year in december of 2017 six months after its release arms received its last major content update with the release of version 5.0 and the game's final character dr coyle roughly a month later a tournament mode was finally added which fixed many of the problems that the game faced however the damage seemed to have been done while the arms community did continue to grow throughout 2018 the game's momentum had effectively been kneecapped and it was a hard drop i mean it was like everything was gone no nothing on twitter nothing on social media nothing on nintendo directs everything was gone and it sucked because they were holding um some kind of e3 thing and splatoon 2 was there that was like a tournament you could play in and arms was nowhere to be found it was like huh this is uh becoming more and more apparent that they're just trying to distance itself from it as much as possible and that kind of sucked that was like the nail in the coffin for me at least within the remaining base of arms players existed smaller communities divided by region each doing what it could to keep the scene alive while continuing to grow in less than ideal conditions support from nintendo became a large factor in the long-term health of the game the place where these discrepancies became most obvious was between america and japan it soon became apparent that nintendo america had arms pretty low on its priority list but despite their perceived indifference to the franchise grassroots arms tournaments continue to pop up at local events like wednesday night fights in southern california catch these arms in nyc and switch hitters in st louis these tournaments among many others allowed for the continued growth of the n a scene and produced many of the region's top players such as gorma gala twin 5-0 resolve and more but as strong as these players are it became painfully obvious what direct support could do when east and west clashed for the first time at evo japan 2018. since its launch arms in japan has been treated with a lot more care than it had anywhere else in the world which is understandable being the country where nintendo is located all throughout 2017 japan's players were treated to higher profile events thrown by nintendo featuring unlocked switches which allowed tournament level custom play from the beginning exclusive prizes and commentary by the game's producer and progenitor of the yubuki combo kosuke yabuki this increased level of focus and attention led to japanese players having a much firmer grasp of high level arms especially when it came to offline tournaments so at the beginning of 2018 as arms players from around the world flew in for evil japan many had no idea what they were in for but despite a clear disadvantage it was gore magala from the us who would end up facing off against the emperor of japanese arms pega everybody called him the emperor he was like this big intimidating and powerful force so of course i was a bit nervous when i first like came across them not to mention in that specific tournament it was like us versus japan sort of thing especially because as time went on i was like the only uh united states player left so everybody was kind of cheering for me and it was just you know really nerve-wracking because i had a i wasn't losing bracket so i could go and fight my way up to like earn the honor of fighting him gore's utilization of helix's tower mode worked for a time to keep pega at bay but ultimately it was pegas max brass who was able to close the distance and be crowned evil champion we'll do it pega will win armed at evo japan 2018 over gore magala wow the two would meet again on gore's home soil for smash and splash four a wisconsin-based major that gave many american and european top players their first chance to face off against the best japan had to offer gore and pega once again found themselves facing off in grand finals but while gore may have come a long way it still proved insufficient to deal with pega's power pekka hits enemy emperor wins both tournaments the reason that paga was so strong is because both because of the character and because of the player max brass the character he uses focuses on rush down so basically when he holds a full charge he becomes buff he gets super armor his arms get bigger and the effect also becomes permanent when he's like under 25 hp so the game plan was basically to buff up and then completely rush down your opponent and predict your wakeups as much as possible so they don't have a chance to like do much of anything as for the player himself he was insanely smart he had great reads he had great technical skills he used um explosions arms often because they would combo into rushes easily and made it hard to rush yourself and overall it's just the combination of his expertise and his technical skill and his ability to just you know intimidate and overwhelm an opponent combined with like the ferociousness of max brass and just that large figure like towering over you with super armor with like little options for you to do it just combined into an opponent that was really really devastating since then i kind of felt like endeavour for my hero academia and i viewed pega as like almighty the status quo would finally be broken at evo 2018 after the events of the previous majors the u.s and japanese scenes had a new respect for one another leading into one of the most intense tournaments in arm's history with competition higher than ever before it was finally time for pega to lose his crown but unexpectedly it wasn't to gore magala instead pega would be knocked into the loser's bracket by the man who had been standing just behind gore up until now twinned 5-0 who placed third at smash and splash just a couple months before although gore and pega still face off in the losers bracket the mountain had already been conquered by another and the emperor of japan stood a little less tall pega would eventually be eliminated from losers bracket by fellow japanese player chateau who then lost to the tournament champion coo at this point it is undoable for coup i think he'd have to build up rush and then land it flawlessly right now actually he might be able to do really big he's got to be really careful about four seconds on the clock three oh one but he's gonna get the landing and he's not gonna and just like that ku is your evo 2018 arms champion he pops out of his seat although japan as a region has remained dominant evo 2018 marked the end of the pega dynasty as well as the end of the golden age of arms the brief spike in the game's popularity began to taper off and arms tournaments became more and more scarce today the arms competitive scene exists primarily online propped up by the dedicated players and to's that refuse to let it die now in the middle of 2020 it's been two and a half years since any content has been released for arms the graphic novel intended to be released in fall of 2018 has still not seen the light of day even though it's still in production despite the passionate cries of fans it seems that nintendo was content to just let the franchise fade into obscurity that was until march 26th 2020 when nintendo dropped a surprise announcement super smash brothers ultimate news approaches the fighter included in wave six of the paid super smash brothers ultimate dlc will be joining the battle from arms arms would be receiving a fighter representative in super smash brothers ultimate after years of radio silence this announcement paired with a free weekend event for arms acted as a siren call to all players that had stood by the franchise in its darkest hour much in the same way that marth and roy's inclusion in smash melee spiked interest in fire emblem fans hoped for a similar spike in interest in arms but not necessarily in its current form while there's still been no official indication of this the competitive community seems to think that nintendo's renewed attention to the franchise indicates a sequel on the horizon no matter what the future holds for arms these boxers are sure to be slugging it out for years to come what do you think of arms do you prefer using a gamepad or the motion controls what changes do you want to see if nintendo does end up coming out with a sequel let us know your thoughts and any other games you want us to cover in the comments below my name's jonah thanks for watching

Channel: Akshon Esports

Views: 326,921

Rating: 4.9340987 out of 5

Keywords: akshon, akshon esports, nintendo switch, arms nintendo, arms nintendo switch, esports, fgc, fighting games, super smash bros ultimate, smash bros ultimate, arms, nintendo, ribbon girl, arms gameplay, arms grand prix, spring man, esports documentary, gaming, competitive gaming, esports news, nintendo arms, nintendo arms smash, nintendo esports, esports fail, what happened to arms, why did arms fail, splatoon 2, tournament, arms smash, pro gaming, min min smash bros, fighter, dlc

Id: iZI-UxXXv7A

Length: 18min 47sec (1127 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 16 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/adamneylan]

Hey guys, I'm the writer of this piece. Let me know what you thought yeah? =)

[u/adamneylan]

Also A huge thanks to these fine folks in the community for making this possible

Special Thanks

Jonathan “Gore Magala” Valdes

Henry “Resolve” Mason

Vanessa “DQQueen” Lovato

Aaron “Bustah” Lovato

Peter “Serp” Ghobrial

Alex “Mario119” Boblitz

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TenTan

[u/Stratilex]

I watched it yesterday, it was a very informative video. Personally I don’t care about esports and competitive scene, but I can understand the struggle they had with ARMS. Hopefully Nintendo fixes it, and goes more in depth competitively and casually for the sequel we expect.

[u/SunnyBunnyARMS]

Super good video my guy!!!

[u/hyato64]

I never played this game. Watched your video and then I searched for arms here see how things are going! Thx a lot!