Welcome to the new paradigm of “fighting” games, maybe not formally competitive though.
Having more than 17.68 million copies sold worldwide by now, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is one of the revolutionary games from Nintendo. The game designer Mashiro Sakurai is a creator for paradigm changing games.
Because 2D platform games were pretty hard and therefore very unfriendly to almost all beginners in 1990s, Sakurai Created the Kirby series, which is famous for its easiness and cute protagonist.
And this gave him the courage to create the revolutionary game that we will be talking about it today, Super Smash Bros series. Fighting games like Street Fighters 2 or Tekken 3 were extremely popular around 2000s, but all of them were to hard to master, since almost every move requires players to memorize complicated input on the control. What’s more, almost every fighting games limited their playable characters on the ground and only facing their opponents, and the stage were extremely small due to that reason.
The Super Smash Bros 64 (named 64 because it was published for Nintendo 64, shortened as Smash 64) deleted both of the characteristics—Smash 64 not only made every move realizable through less than 2 inputs, but it also gave the game a huge stage because of its winning mechanism. Players will not have traditional HP (hit points, if it is zero, then the player loses), they now have the percentage that marks the easiness for knock outs. No matter how high the percentage one has, they will not lose if they are not knock out from the screen.
The game itself is so different from other fighting games that controversies were constantly going around since its creation 20 years ago, here is a video about some opinions of it if one wants to find out more. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDe62JLesuA
And here is a informal podcast done by Bryan Ortiz (the first-year student for new Humes), Taylor McFadden (the second-year student for new Humes), and me (the third-year student for new Humes).
