If you’re at all familiar with fighting games, you’ve likely heard of Super Smash Bros. In this article, we’ll cover the ways it’s unique amongst other fighting games, and why it’s so popular.
If you’re at all familiar with fighting games, you’ve likely heard of Super Smash Bros. If you’ve played or even seen any video games, you’ll definitely have seen the characters featured.
Super Smash Bros is a fighting game made by Nintendo. It originally featured characters from various Nintendo games, but has gradually evolved to include many other beloved characters from other franchises, such as Joker from Persona 5, Steve from Minecraft and the Hero from Dragon Quest.
What Makes Smash Bros DIfferent From Other Fighting Games?
Aside from the variety of classic playable characters like Olimar, Pikachu and Isabelle, Super Smash Bros also differentiates itself from other games with one unique mechanic: its KO system.
Instead of using a health bar that depletes when you take damage, the objective of the game is to knock your opponent off the stage with various attacks. Instead of a health bar, you instead have a counter that starts at 0%. As you deal damage to your opponent, that percentage goes up. As the percentage goes up, they’ll fly farther when you knock them away.
With that in mind, how do you control your character?
The Controls
In this game, you can run, jump, attack, guard and grab. While all characters guard and grab in similar ways, the attacks are what makes each character unique.
By pressing A, characters have a variety of regular attacks. If you press A while tilting the left analog stick (which you use to move) you’ll perform a tilt attack, which can be an upward, downward or sideway attack depending on the direction of the left analog stick.
While normal attacks can be vaguely similar between characters, special attacks are what makes characters unique. These attacks can vary from throwing a boomerang, to spitting poison, to turning into a rock.
Finally, smash attacks are the moves that knock your opponents off the stage. They’re often very slow moving and can be easily countered by normal and special attacks. However, if it does land, it does tremendous damage and will send your opponent to the stratosphere.
Why Is Super Smash Bros. So Popular?
Super Smash Bros boasts a huge roster of well-known characters, so even if you don’t like fighting games, you’re bound to find a character you recognize. The game is easy to learn for beginners as the basics are just moving, jumping and attacking.
It’s also fun to master as there’s a lot of depth to the game, with guards beating attacks, attacks beating grabs, and grabs beating guards. This isn’t even mentioning the myriad of character combos you can master, the countless stages, the fun game modes and a massive esports audience as well.
Super Smash Bros stands tall amongst the myriad of other fighting games. With time, it’ll surely grow as an esports game, with many more up-and-coming pro players to come.