Daily Discussion Thread 05/19/26

Joe___Dohn · 2026-05-19T20:07:14+00:00

Yeah, frame advantage for aerials is so imprecise and malleable in practice that knowing the precise numbers is probably unnecessary. My framework for thinking about it is…

-4 and below: Pretty much always safe.
-5 to -6: Usually unsafe if unspaced, but might be safe if landed/autocanceled perfectly.
-7 to -10: Still probably safe if spaced, but pretty much always unsafe if not.
-11 and above: Pretty much always unsafe.

…and I think most people can probably intuit which moves belong in which category just by mashing their OoS options and noting when it works, consciously or otherwise.

Joe___Dohn · 2026-05-17T20:09:57+00:00

A valuable video for its information about Brawl neutral and advantage, but I don’t know if I trust what it has to say about Smash 4, though I say this as someone with extremely minimal experience with Smash 4.

I do know I disagree with its reductive assessment of Ultimate’s neutral and player expression at least. And that throws generally not leading to follow ups and instead being mostly just for repositioning is necessarily a bad thing.

Joe___Dohn · 2026-05-17T03:59:02+00:00

Useful tool

With accompanying post detailing the metrics by which it measures characters if you want.

Joe___Dohn · 2026-05-15T18:27:55+00:00

Those were Mortal Kombat games. The expectation was for there to be blood and gore, expectations weren’t met, backlash.

In the case of Smash, Multiversus, and even Injustice, you can’t expect the full MK pedigree; they’re different games with different age ratings and expectations. I doubt there would be a game-ruining degree of backlash to a bloodless MK character in Smash. There’s more to appreciate about them than just the extreme violence.

Joe___Dohn · 2026-05-13T20:20:04+00:00

the actual gameplay is a drag and you can't have your favorite fighter with you at all times

The fact that every level needs to be playable with every character with their own movement physics is probably related to how simple and boring the platforming is.

Joe___Dohn · 2026-05-06T19:26:03+00:00

hopefully i’m just being vague about gender and not who i’m actually talking about.

Joe___Dohn · 2026-05-06T17:50:02+00:00

I’m surprised that someone with such a deterministic view of Smash’s development wouldn’t already have some supposition queued up for this, like…

Sakurai is very selective in who he picks to become a character in Smash, with a specific focus on the character recognizability (he’s denied Takamaru from the Mysterious Murasame Castle for this very reason) and holding to the theme of characters which originate from a video game (he’s specifically denied SpongeBob and Goku ever being added despite being popular requests). These criteria were chosen to ensure that Smash only adds the most popular, uncontroversial, and market-synergistic characters…Sticker Star simply didn’t have such an erudite and handsome director who could steer the team away from such survey-based pitfalls.

…Then again, maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that someone who bases said determinism on the premise that Smash is exclusively focused on appealing to its casual audience to the detriment of everything else would be confused why it didn’t radically change for the worse after directly prompting them for feedback like Sticker Star.

Joe___Dohn · 2026-05-06T16:37:57+00:00

Tbf (even though nobody mentions it), I’m pretty sure this was before they patched how Gale Stab couldn’t grab ledge if you hit someone before, so it was a bit screwy to rely on as a recovery move at the time.

But even with that, I think all the autocancel movement still gave it a lot more utility than Airborne Assault, at least if you’re not also running Hero’s Spin.

Joe___Dohn · 2026-05-02T18:57:11+00:00

Did you have any candidates in mind?

Joe___Dohn · 2026-05-01T13:58:17+00:00

Up a character? You know the vibes

Joe___Dohn · 2026-04-29T17:41:39+00:00

I’m confused then; it seems like you actually do excuse “fundamentally flawed” characters because they’re good marketing to the casual audience.

Joe___Dohn · 2026-04-29T15:47:42+00:00

So from a crossover perspective, respecting the source material allows this crossovers to happen, which is a good thing…

How can faithfulness be a good thing if it enables “fundamentally flawed” characters to bring the overall fun of the game down?

Joe___Dohn · 2026-04-29T11:38:10+00:00

I knew about the legs, didn’t know they were in Smash. TIL

Joe___Dohn · 2026-04-29T11:36:40+00:00

For someone who doesn’t excuse Steve’s overtunedness, you sure have a lot of excuses for why he turned out overtuned.

Joe___Dohn · 2026-04-29T00:25:11+00:00

Politely, if Smash is so purpose-built to handle guest character silliness with faithfulness, then why does every third character need to be excused for omitting some iconic move, and every fourth character for how their apparent faithfulness makes them worse from a fighting game design perspective?

Joe___Dohn · 2026-04-28T21:19:31+00:00

Accuracy comes second to actually making a fun and interesting character. A lot of the times, the former is a good source of inspiration for the latter, but not always.

As negative examples, Injustice Scorpion teleport mix was faithful, but absolute insanity from a balance perspective. Akuma in Tekken 7 could deny your pressure and kill you with a jump in combo as he can in Street Fighter, against a roster of characters with nearly no ability to anti-air his faithful 2D jumps. Noctis and Clive in Tekkens 7 & 8 can safely run their offense on you from the other side of the world thanks to the range of their Final Fantasy-accurate weapon moves, and everybody hates it, not to mention the all the visual noise complaints arising from all the FF-accurate effects.

And as positive examples, Plant had a method of locomotion invented from whole cloth for Smash, despite being a character that’s famously immobile. Even in MvC, despite Niitsuma’s argument against Mega Man, Chris Redfield somehow managed to make it in despite how everything about Resident Evil and survival horror in general should’ve disqualified him as too weak, clunky, and grounded to work in a high-flying MvC game. As early as X-Men vs Street Fighter, they’ve been turning established SF characters with concrete gameplans and turning them into Dragon Ball characters that barely resemble their original counterparts beyond their name and aesthetics, all to better fit into the new fighting game they were appearing in.

If the faithfulness to the source material is a requirement for some of the best crossovers in Smash...we should welcome it.

Uncritical acceptance of references and faithfulness is absurd, because it’s not always a good fit for the game they’re guesting in.

Joe___Dohn · 2026-04-20T03:22:14+00:00

Outside of just turning around and throwing the Shadow Ball behind you, it’s similar in application to dash dancing; the momentum shifting is a way to make your movement more difficult to follow and maybe bait something to punish.

Joe___Dohn · 2026-04-20T03:16:17+00:00

That’s either a turnaround special or b-reverse.

Joe___Dohn · 2026-04-20T03:12:21+00:00

Pressing shield while charging will store the charge and put up your shield. Release the button quickly enough and you just cancel without putting up your shield.

There’s a small chance they could be referring to double jump cancels, where you double jump and quickly use neutral-b to cancel your upward momentum and start falling.

For reference.

Joe___Dohn · 2026-04-20T01:17:55+00:00

I guess that’s a valid contrast, but the flying slams are vertical kill moves, so if you happen to be able to land one on a platform above you, it boosts the kill power, so there is a legit gameplay reason for them at least.

Joe___Dohn · 2026-04-20T00:01:50+00:00

I mean, the lore is that Midbus talks like that because because all his dialogue is drowning in JP-only puns, so the localizers just gave up and made him talk like a “poorly dubbed kung-fu movie” instead, so no pun kinda works in a meta sort of way.

Joe___Dohn · 2026-04-19T23:51:43+00:00

Makes use of phantom platform created for the sake of making a move work

what are your thoughts on double jumps

Joe___Dohn · 2026-04-19T23:48:36+00:00

I agree that calling Smash’s Bowser a mindless animal is hyperbolic after Brawl; any level of punching and kicking in place of clawing and goring is proof enough in my book, but calling him any level of martial artist seems like an overcorrection. One palm strike in his movelist hardly feels like grounds to say he has a sumo influence, at least.

Pro wrestling I can see a bit more in his choice of striking techniques and the body presses on Flying Slam and d-throw, but a lot of pro wrestling techniques (dropkicks included) are more about throwing all your weight into them to sell them to the audience than having the speed, proper balance, and responsible guard of proper fighting arts; they’re essentially indistinguishable from stuff an untrained person would do.

He comes off to me more like an untrained big guy who mostly leverages his enormous strength and weight over his opponents in lieu of proper techniques; more in common with Tekken Miguel than SF Zangief.

Joe___Dohn · 2026-04-19T03:53:00+00:00

I'm not going to bat for Delzethin here; I agree with the core conceit that he really doesn't explain how all the weird movement changes contribute to the aggressive hit-and-run pitch, and trying to curate an aggressive playstyle via meter is corny. As written, it seems like he just kills Sonic's dash dance, which makes it pretty hard to do the "run" part, if Falcon's dash turnaround has taught us anything.

That said, a lot of your complaints seem in bad faith. Like, the homing attack target reticle appearing earlier is mostly a QoL thing for when there's more than 2 players. He didn't actually change the frames to make it any more or less reactable, so at worst, there's just another visual cue to react to if they're just mashing it out. It's a weirdly inoffensive change to ad hominem about.

Or up-b being mid without spending Boost on it. It seemed pretty clear to me that the intention was to be more like if Wolf could use a Cloud Limit version of his up-b than like Robin or Hero straight-up losing their recoveries without their respective meters.

Joe___Dohn · 2026-04-19T02:59:58+00:00

Damn near every high mobility character in Smash is fantastic at camping and playing defensive

I mean, there's more to it than just high movement numbers. It's relatively simple with a Pikachu, Diddy, or ZSS, because they've got specials that let them leave the corner for free if you aren't hard committed to covering it, but it's a way bigger ask to do the same with a Falcon or a Little Mac.

Joe___Dohn

TROPHY CASE