Sunday, June 14, 2015

T3H PH1R3 5T177 8URN5

Huge update to SSB4 today, with three new characters and three new stages. First thing I noted is how crazy buffed Roy is compared to Melee, and also how different he feels. He really isn't a carbon copy of Marth anymore... I'm impressed, the game designers really did their homework. Of course he's still somewhat similar, but whether you want to call the process he went through Luigifying or Ganonifying, he's different enough to not be obsoleted by Marth and/or Lucina from the get-go. Hell, I went for the All-Star no-heal challenge on Normal difficulty with him, and nailed it on the first try. He just might be my permanent secondary at this point. What is it with me and dudes with swords anyway?

Lucas is... well, Lucas. Nothing special really stood out to me compared to Brawl, but then again I never used the Mother duo much, if at all. Ryu is one of those characters that has a special gimmick, though I guess I should technically say he's the only character in the entire game who doesn't, since Smash is hardly a normal fighting game. I'm referring to the fact that his special move inputs from Street Fighter are implemented here, and if you do them correctly you get more powerful versions of your moves / get invincibility during Shoryuken. Likewise, you also get more powerful attacks by holding the button a bit instead of just tapping it. A great playstyle if you're familiar with conventional fighters, but if you're not... eh, you're probably not going to use Ryu much. Guess which category I belong to? Yeah, I don't do fighters, and Smash's appeal for me is the fact that it's so much more straightforward and accessible than anything else.

As for the new stages, there's one free one and two paid ones. The free stage is Miiverse, which is functionally identical to Battlefield, except you get actual Miiverse messages cheering on the characters that are currently fighting. Miiverse sucks, and I already have Battlefield anyway, so I'm going to tell you right now, if it was paid DLC I would've passed up on it. I guess Nintendo also figured that one out, and made it free. Suzaku Castle is another fairly standard stage without much of a special gimmick, so if you really, REALLY hate stuff like Gamer or Port Town then you'll enjoy this. Then there's Dream Land which returns from the original game, and, well, it's totally unchanged, with Whispy Woods blowing on you every now and then. Speaking of the original's stages, I should also note that Peach's Castle and Hyrule Castle will also make a return at a later date.

20 comments:

  1. I agree with you about Roy. I never could really be good with Marth, because I do not tend to be very precise with my attacks. But since they changed many of Roy's attacks to have a shorter range, it actually benefits in learning to play him properly. Here I was, trying so hard to master Robin to have at least one Fire Emblem character as a secondary main. All that work for me to end up returning to Roy. I only had enough money on my Nintendo ID for one non-Ryu character, sadly, but I'm glad I picked Roy first.

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    1. Problem is, Marth had more range AND more power too, since his sweetspot was farther away AND did more damage than Roy's.

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    2. As I said probably prematurely on the previous post (considering Slow typed this new one pretty soon afterwards), Roy actually feels like a really good middle ground between Marth and Ike now in terms of power, weight and speed. And in exchange for that good balance of characteristics, he simply sacrifices range. I think that sums him up fairly well.

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    3. Roy's also kinda like Lucina in their relative ease of use for low-level players.

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    4. This is just in. With absolutely frame-perfect timing, it's actually possible to get a maximum (as far as we know as of this comment) of 9230.6 ft. using Roy in Homerun Contest. He's like almost twice as god-like as Ganondorf in there.

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  2. I got em right away, pretty good update with dlc, apparently Diddy's throws have been nerfed and something aboujt sheik i've heard
    Plus Ryu's special inputs are cool

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    1. Whoa, they already nuked Diddy with the last update, and they're at it again? I can understand Sheik though. Why are they not touching Rosalina is the $64000 question.

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    2. Zero is saying that Diddy's up-air has been nerfed even further, and that he's definitely not top tier anymore. We need more bones thrown in DK's direction.

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    3. The Smash Wiki has a list of all the changes found thus far. A LOT of buffs across the board, except for Diddy.

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  3. You're probably a better player than me, though, so of course you'd have done the challenge long ago. All-Star on Hard with everyone sounds like something I'd never do... I mean, I struggled to do it with Ike, so I can only imagine the trainwreck that'd be. Some people consider that one just as hard as Classic on 9.0 with no deaths. I'm working on-and-off on the Classic 7.0 with everyone, and Mewtwo gave me so much trouble I decided to move on to other characters. I quit on Classic 8.0 with 2/3 characters for a while, because Master Fortress just destroys me.

    So yeah, I'm a pretty big scrub-a-dub, so Normal All-Star with no healing is huge for me.

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  4. Miiverse was probably free because it was promised from the beginning and it relies on the community to function. I think it's a neat idea, though, and Miiverse is a nice community option that's implemented well in games like SM3DW, WWHD and Splatoon. I don't write anything personally because I'm not creative, but some people are quite artistic or funny.

    Ryu is my favorite part of this update, and I'm not into fighting games or Street Fighter at all. It's so satisfying to pull off the advanced moves, and he's quite good overall. I also have to gush about the effect on his down special. The ink almost shifts the art style for Ryu for a second, making him look like something out of a painting. It looks so cool!

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    1. Funny, I heard Miiverse was absolutely terrible. Granted, I didn't take a good look at how deep the rabbit hole went, but what little I saw didn't impress me at all.

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    2. The Miiverse stage is probably exactly what you think. I was talking about the Miiverse stage and then Miiverse in general in my post, so I apologize if that was confusing. The one thing about the stage you might not know (and I haven't 100% confirmed yet) is that a bunch of posts about a character pop up at once when that character executes a FS, which is a neat effect. The stage ultimately adds nothing practical, but it's more interesting than Battlefield, anyway.

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    3. Battlefield has a much better music selection, if nothing else.

      And I was talking about Miiverse in general too.

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    4. I've always had a fondness for the Wii Shop menu theme and Nintendo Land's theme, so I'm covered. I think we can agree that the real winner among the new stage music is Dream Land, though. The retro themes are really nostalgic, and the Triple Deluxe track is epic.

      Suzaku Castle has some good stuff, too. Even I recognize those iconic tracks.

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  5. Dream Land changed quite a bit actually.
    The blast zones are A LOT closer than they used to be.
    Like, imagine if you stacked the whole entire space of the flying portion of Halberd on the top of Dreamland. That's how much taller it was, give or take. Maybe even taller than that. Blast zones were further away on the sides too.
    I'm a little bummed about that since I was looking forward to having a stage where I don't have to worry about dying to Rosalina at stupidly low percents.

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    1. Why Rosalina in particular? I mean, I get that she's the best character, but why would she benefit from that more than anyone else? Doesn't it make it easier for everyone to get kills?

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    2. You're thinking of melee DL64. The original SSB had those kinds of blast zones.

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    3. Haha, Rosalina's upair in particular is just very infamous
      I was sorta half-joking tho'

      Was it? Well, got me then lol. Yeah, I was going off of Melee.
      Last time I played on the original Dream Land was a pretty long time ago.

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  6. We're never going to get 64 Saffron City back, are we?

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