User:Shard/Brawl
If you've ever played any Smash games, you know it's a fun twist on traditional fighting games like Street Fighter. Competitive smash, like many fighting games, has always had a natural tiering effect due to some characters having better matchups than others, but it wasn't until Brawl that this became a huge issue.
The top two characters in Brawl, tier-wise, are MetaKnight and Snake. Metaknight is at the top because his attacks are very fast, very spammable and have high priority, and he is able to juggle heavier characters for very long periods of time. His stage recovery is by far the best in the game (perhaps second only to ROB), and having 3 ways to recover makes his recovery unpredictable. His edgeguard game is also pretty solid - his dAir can keep people off the edge almost indefinitely. However, his strengths are all numbers issues. When balancing him in my Brawl mod, most of his changes involve decreased frame speeds and knockback.
MetaKnight is without a doubt overpowered, but the only thing broken about him is a bug in his dimension cape that, if used a certain way, makes him invincible and invisible for as long as the user's fingers don't get tired. This has been banned in most tournaments, so it's no longer an issue worth noting.
Before I go further, let me explain the movesets in general. In brawl, there are two main types of attacks. A attacks (regular attacks) and B attacks (specials). Among the A attacks, there are jabs (just pressing A. These are weak.), tilts (holding a direction and pressing A, a bit stronger than jabs), and smashes (mashing a direction + A at the same time) Smashes can be charged, and are the easiest way to kill someone, but they are slow and hard to hit with. The objective is to knock your opponent out of the stage boundaries, in any direction (up, down, or on the sides). The more damage they have, the farther they travel when you hit them. Therefore, matches usually consist of getting your opponent to a medium amount of damage (60ish) with weak attacks, then trying to smash them off the stage.
Snake, on the other hand, is a good example of the difference between "broken" and "overpowered." Snake is without a doubt overpowered. If you take B-moves away from all the game's characters, snake becomes the best character handily. His attacks do the most damage, have the most knockback, the most range, and all come out INSTANTLY. I'm not even joking. Only 1 character attacks faster than Snake. Can you guess? It's MetaKnight. So basically, Snake's regular attacks are the best in the game by the numbers. This makes him overpowered.
His grenades, however, make him broken. There are three things wrong with them. First, if you hit snake while he's holding a grenade, you both explode and take 10-12 damage (that's a lot). This isn't a big deal for snake because he's the third heaviest character in a game of 39. This also means you can't combo him while he has grenades. Secondly, if he throws a grenade and you pick it up accidentally (the attack button is the same as the "pick up items" button), you can only attack if you get rid of the grenade first, but you can't, because Snake's attack speeds are faster than the item throwing animations, and he will just use a tilt to send you flying before you can do anything. After you're halfway across the map, the grenade will blow up in your face, and he will continue spamming them.
The last thing wrong with grenades - he can ignore the game's physics. If you have a grenade on the field (either in the air, on the ground, or in another character's hand), and you shield while holding a second grenade, both grenades will lose all momentum, be dropped by all players, and fall to the ground. Yes, Snake's shield breaks the rules of the game, but that's the least of your problems. A snake player who knows how to count to three (the fuse time) can chuck a nade at you and use this tactic to prevent you from ever picking his grenades up. The end result - well, you explode a lot.
I should mention he also has a technique called Dash-Attack-Cancelled-Up-Smash (DACUS). It involves starting your dash attack, and quickly cancelling it into an up smash. The point of doing this is that you keep the momentum you gained from the dash attack, so you can basically do an up smash while moving. Most characters can do this, but Snake's is particularly special because it almost triples how quickly he can move around the stage. Oh yeah, and his up smash hits you while he's sliding and sends you up. Oh yeah, then a mortar shoots at you and you blow up. He does this a few times in the video below.
In short, all of Snake's moves are bullshit. The reason he's top tier is because he's easy to learn and easy to master. Oh yeah, and he's the best character in the game. That makes a big difference.
There's a very good video of a tournament final where Ally (possibly the world's best Snake player) goes 3-0 against Diem (one of the top 5 MK players in the world). In Brawl, you don't get healed after each KO, so going 3-0 almost never happens.
The Snake vs MK (MetaKnight) debate has been going on since the game came out. A large portion (just above half) of the SmashBoards community wants to ban MetaKnight from standard tournaments, but no official rulings for that have been enforced.
MK and Snake being declared as top tier causes a phenomenon where players without mains start maining those characters, under the assumption that they're better than the other characters (which isn't necessarily true). This causes the metagame to be filled with those characters, and advanced techniques for those characters (like grenade stripping) evolve much more rapidly.
It is natural that since 50% of the competitive community mains snake or MK, they don't want to ban him. When someone who understands balance explains why Snake is broken, of course, it gets dismissed as trolling, despite the fact that I proved he breaks the game's rules.
On to the final point, which will hopefully express how broken Snake's grenades are. One of my friends at the campus I attend mains snake, and we play Brawl between classes almost every day. I've been bringing experimental builds of my balanced brawl every couple days, and there have been no complaints. I made a change for Snake that causes him to take 10 damage when he doesn't lob a grenade (either when they blow up upon getting hit, or when he strips them, the two things that cause all of snake's brokenness). Based on this alone, my friend says he would not play as Snake. An older build contained only numbers changes on his attacks (slower frame speed, lower damage, etc), and he was still able to beat everyone else handily.
Snake is broken.
So, I decided to fix him myself. When I get to a version I'm happy with releasing, I will upload it on this thread of my forums. Snake is in a good place now, I'm just working on all the other characters.
