Why Super Smash Bros. Melee is The Best Balanced Smash Game

Good balance is a hallmark of great competitive games, and the same is true of fighting video games. Originally, fighting games were often hit-or-miss when it came to balance, as it wasn’t possible to update games on consoles up until the last 15 years or so. But due to that, they were developed under a different philosophy as balance was effectively something developers only got to tweak once. As such contrary to what you might initially think, older fighting games are often not subject to bad balance due to the more meticulous process. The Smash Bros. series has had games all throughout the years, with the balance between the games being all far different from each other. However, a common belief spread around I the Smash community is that Melee is a poorly balanced game, and that most people agree that Ultimate is the most balanced Smash game. The other games in the series, Smash 64, Brawl, and Smash 4, are often not brought into the conversation when it comes to balance as they aren’t as competitively popular as Melee and Ultimate, though I will discuss them here as I believe it’s important as Melee and Ultimate have 16 years of changes between them across these games. So while it can be easy to think Ultimate is the better balanced game due to a lower disparity between tiers and a considerably larger roster means there are more top and high-tiered characters, this could not be further from the truth. While Ultimate could be considered the “most” balanced Smash game, Melee is the best balanced Smash game without a doubt.

But before we can even prove why Melee’s balance is the best, it’s important to explain what balance is in it’s basic sense. The basic Oxford Dictionary definition of the world “balance” is, “a situation in which different things exist in equal, correct or good amounts.” In the case of a fighting game series like Smash Bros., the “situation” is the game, whilst the “different things” are the individual things that make a character fun to play but also fair to fight, such as their attributes, moves, and special gimmicks or abilities. Additionally, they could also include mechanics of the game beyond the characters, such as universal techniques or stages.

So, in essence, a balanced game features fun and fair characters, but also fun and fair mechanics too. Thus, things brings me to my main point: is it better if a game is “more” balanced or simply has “good” balance. A more balanced game generally has every character playable for the most part. Match-ups are also not as polarizing due to this. And after all, if everyone is good to some extent, then why wouldn’t having more balance be better than simply good balance? Well, problems start to emerge when you try to make every character good. Simply making every character the equivalent of an A-tier or S-tier level character often doesn’t lead to healthy metagames, and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is extremely guilty of this. 

Compared to Ultimate, Super Smash Bros. Melee has far more universal options in terms of movement, offense, and defense. As Masahiro Sakurai’s, the creator and director of the entire series, design philosophy changed throughout the years, he ultimately decided that he wanted the series to be more approachable to people not as interested in fighting games hence Ultimate’s more simplistic moveset. However, this change in philosophy wasn’t positive for the competitiveness of the series. As David Sirlin, a fighting game designer and fighting game player, states “A multiplayer game is balanced if a reasonably large number of options available to the player are viable–especially, but not limited to, during high-level play by expert players.” (Sirlin). In Melee, every character has access to “light shielding”, a mechanic where using the analog on the triggers makes your shield bigger and last MUCH longer at the cost of pushing you back farther when hit by an attack, preventing punishment but also putting you in a safer position. Additionally, when you shield as soon as an attack makes contact with you, it will be a “perfect shield,” which allows you to act sooner and additionally reflects projectiles back. Not only does this give every character a way to escape shield pressure via light shielding, it also gives every character a skill-based way to fight against projectiles. Lastly, there’s “shield dropping,” which is a bit advanced and I won’t go into full detail, but it allows you to escape under platforms from a shield which is incredibly helpful for avoiding pressure or getting in a more advantageous position. 

Compare this to Ultimate, where after several reworks to defense after it got too powerful in Super Smash Bros. Brawl and Super Smash Bros. for 3DS and Wii U, we’re left with… parrying, which replaces perfect shielding. It’s sort of ironic that it’s called parrying considering perfect shielding functions FAR more like a conventional fighting game parry. Instead of timing it so you shield as soon as an attack connects, you shield an attack and then let go of shield at the right time. You can buffer it for multi-hits, and it does indeed let you punish poorly spaced moves, though it’s not nearly as useful and is harder to get used to. It also does not deflect projectiles, which I found to be a baffling change as perfect shielding was already nerfed from Melee to Brawl as it sends projectiles at a 45-degree angle instead of straight forward, not like that was a good change either. Not to mention, shield dropping was just removed.

Additionally, Melee’s balance is far tighter and even with no patches at all, there has never been a point where a character was ever good enough to seriously consider banning them. Even the top characters in the game who are widely believed to be Fox and Marth have their own glaring weaknesses, such as Fox being arguably the most susceptible to being “combo’d” and Marth’s inconsistency at killing at higher percentages. Smash 64 is basically just ruled by Pikachu and Kirby,  Brawl should’ve banned Meta Knight,  Smash for Wii U and 3DS– which I’m calling Smash 4 from now on because the official name is quite a mess– has both Bayonetta AND Cloud as the definitive top 2 and led to the game’s popularity dropping significantly after the launch of Ultimate. And Ultimate? Ultimate is the second game in the series (third if you count Cloud’s ban from doubles) to have a character be banned. But unlike Brawl, which had Meta Knight banned temporarily and generally was unsupported, two characters are in heavy discussion to be banned now from Smash Ultimate. As said on EventHubs, “Minecraft’s Steve and Tekken’s Kazuya Mishima have now apparently been banned from one of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate’s biggest weekly tournament series in Texas, Ultimate Shockwave. Similarly, it’s also been announced that these two Fighters Pass Vol. 2 DLC characters have also been banned from Super Smash Odyssey.” It’s not just locals either. The biweekly regional online tournament hosted by popular Melee and Ultimate player Juan “Hungrybox” Debiedma called “The Coinbox” is a rather popular tournament that often attracts the attention of top players in the world such as MkLeo and Spargo who attend frequently. Hungrybox recently tweeted “Steve will be banned at the Coinbox for the foreseeable future.” He banned Steve due to a game breaking technique in which Steve can cancel all the knockback of an attack by using his neutral special move in an exploit. Since Ultimate is done and won’t be getting updated again, this technique called the “phantom MLG” was the straw that broke the camel’s back. And it only looks like the bans are getting more and more popular among players. Compared to Melee, which has never ever had any serious talks of banning someone. Fox, as prominent as he is in the metagame, is not infallible and best of all is arguably healthy for the meta unlike the top characters in the other games in the series who are too centralizing. For example: removing Meta Knight would make Brawl a much better game; while removing Fox would be a killing blow to Melee, imbalancing everything. 

Modern Smash’s removal of universal mechanics continues beyond just defense as well. Movement as a whole is far simpler and linear in later Smash Bros. games. Dash dancing, a technique where you dash back and forth to make your approach towards the opponent ambiguous and tricky, is weakened significantly even after buffs to it after Brawl and Smash 4. Wavedashing was notably removed after Melee which absolutely crippled several characters, such as Luigi who lost his ability to travel on the ground swiftly as a result. It’s just not possible to mix up your movement at all in Ultimate for most characters, leading to characters with good projectiles and disjointed reach to be overpowered. Numerous top-tier characters in Ultimate have great reach, such as Pyra, Mythra, Joker, Shulk, Roy, Cloud. 

However, it can be argued that these mechanics, while deep and rich for competitive players, can be alienating to casual players. But the oversimplification of a game can significantly hurt its balance, as with a lack of options the game can feel clunky or unintuitive. Masahiro Sakurai himself argues as much, claiming that without a sense of depth in a fighting game, it also lacks “push and pull”  aspects, as he says. In fact, he brings up two games in particular: Street Fighter 1 and Street Fighter 2. Street Fighter 1 is obviously dated, being one of the first of its genre. Numerous mechanics were missing, such as special moves which were limited to Ryu exclusively and were more like “secret” moves instead, with the Shoryuken being capable of instantly killing opponents. Generally, it’s considered a clunky and imbalanced fighting game, though its age explains why. Street Fighter 2 meanwhile definitely was a much better game, often considered to be one of the best fighting games of all time. The roster was expanded, along with movesets. Every character gets multiple special moves and new super moves. Sakurai himself even claimed the game had “incredible depth” especially in comparison to the first game. And due to the greater depth of the game, it leads to a more balanced experience with a thriving competitive scene lasting to this day.

All in all, Melee is often incorrectly assumed to be unbalanced to its smaller variety of characters generally seen in competitive play. While it is true that only half the cast sees extensive use in the modern meta, the same could be argued for Ultimate. As Melee has much less characters— Ultimate has 89 characters compared to Melee’s 26 viable characters— Ultimate sees about the same percentage of characters used. Especially due to the popularity of the DLC characters, who have an ever growing number of them in the top 10 or 20. However Melee’s focus on skill and the presence of numerous options every character can perform often leads to a more balanced experience compared to Ultimate which is more focused on character gimmicks and far simpler strategies. 

To put it simply, Ultimate is more balanced in that there are more “good” characters, while Melee’s balance is better because everyone is on the same playing field.

Work’s Cited

Debiedma, Juan ‘Hungrybox’. “Steve Is Officially Banned at the Coinbox for the Foreseeable Future.” Twitter, Hungrybox, 2 Mar. 2023, https://twitter.com/LiquidHbox/status/1631435704772317186

Gordon, Justin ‘AdaptiveTrigger’. “Steve and Kazuya Mishima Both Banned from One of Super Smash Bros.. Ultimate’s Biggest Weekly Tournament Series in Texas.” EventHubs, EventHubs, 17 Apr. 2023, https://www.eventhubs.com/news/2023/apr/17/steve-kazuya-banned-ssbu-weekly

Sakurai, Masahiro. “Do Competitive Games Have to Be Complex? [Game Essence].” Translated by Nate Behildorf, YouTube, Masahiro Sakurai, 8 Mar. 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ggw9xXbzig

Sirlin, David. “Balancing Multiplayer Games, Part 1: Definitions.” Sirlin.net, David Sirlin, 16 Sept. 2014, https://www.sirlin.net/articles/balancing-multiplayer-games-part-1-definitions