Title: Sakurai: players “gave up on Melee because it’s too technical", won't focus too much on competitive
Reason: User Warned - Inflammatory Comment
Ugh, this man will never forgo an opportunity to shit on Melee, will he? Hell, the guy even uses the same asinine talking points from 2005. First of all, not a single, solitary major media outlet that criticized SSBM for being "too technical" at the time of release. Zero. Nada. Completely, and entirely, NON-EXISTENT. That's not to say that there weren't individual people from the hoi polloi who might have complained about Melee, obviously. But there was never widespread disappointment with SSBM. There was no large scale backlash. The game was universally praised when it came out. Need I remind everyone that this game that was so overtly "complicated" and utterly burdensome, managed to somehow sell two million MORE copies than its relatively far simpler predecessor? And on a userbase that had ten million fewer people. Any resentment that occurred was completely and entirely retroactive, and it was led by one man (I'll let you guess who). Second of all, his logic is completely non-sensical. People couldn't enjoy Melee because their friends would be too skilled? Can't that argument be applied to literally every single competitive game in existence? If you can't enjoy a game because your friends are too good, well don't blame the game. Blame your shitty friends! Get new ones! Sakurai acts like people are forced to learn wavedashing, L-cancelling and all that other shit the moment they pick up a GC controller, as if no one has any agency whatsoever. Are you somehow mandated to enter tournaments the moment you place the game disc in the console? Do the Nintendo Ninjas show up at your house and hold your family hostage unless you sign up to Evo? And finally, he once again creates this moronic false dichotomy where you can have either a competitive, highly technical an precision based fighting game, or a fun game. But you can't have both. BULL. SHIT. I'm not even some snooty, elite tourney player. I don't like playing with items off on final destination all the time. Hell, I've been playing the game since 2001 and I have yet to properly wavedash. Yet, I think SSBM is still by far and away the most enjoyable and fun Smash Bros. title. But Sakurai is so blinded by the animosity he developed the moment he found out people were playing SSBM in a way that he didn't approve of, that he wanted to throw the baby out the with the bathwater. Because in the end, that's all he is. A big, fat baby.
Link: https://www.resetera.com/posts/10306093/
Archive.is (legacy): https://archive.is/H4w33