Embracing Both Sides of the Coin: Competative and Casual

For the past month, I've been hanging out in a Smash coaching Discord server.  While there, I've been playing friendlies, getting periodic coaching sessions, and streaming some of their weekly tournaments for them.  I have had interest in the more competitive side of the Smash Brothers series, but recently, well, after watching Frostbite 2020, I decided I wanted to improve my play at the game.  I started by joining my the Discord for my local Smash scene, but never made it to a weekly due to my illnesses at the time, and my work schedule, because I would get off work after their weekly tournaments and meetings started.  Then everything shut down, weekly meetings stopped, and I found myself looking at coaching servers for the first time.  

Super Smash Brothers is an interesting game.  Ostensibly, it's a party game.  Chaotic free for all battles for up to 4 (or 8 in new iterations) players featuring your favorite characters from a wide variety of game series.  Stages will undergo transformations, or you may fight along an auto scrolling version of Super Mario Bros. famous 1-1, tossing Pokeballs, bob-ombs, and even shooting the Super Scope at each other.  It's a wacky, messy, hilarious mess for you and your friends.  It was time to settle those schoolyard questions of "Who could win in a fight, Mario or Link".

Like the Pokemon series before it, you can peel back the light hearted surface and find a rock hard core for a competitive game.  With these two games, it's fascinating to see how different the game most people play differs from how the competitive scene plays them.  Some of the biggest differences between the two are the things that don't get used.  Both games have certain aspects of them banned for use in competitive play, narrowing the list of options available to you.  In a Pokemon game, you may be limited by how many Legendaries or Mythical pokemon you may use, while in Smash all but around a half dozen stages are banned for use for a variety of reasons.  

The purpose of bans is to either make the game more fair, or to remove options that could polarize the whole competitive scene for that game.  If something is an automatic use for each and every team type, then it can restrict the types of teams that see play.  Likewise, if a set of stages unfairly punishes slow characters, you would see fewer slower powerhouses, as the stage could cost them games.  Of the remaining stages, they are either neutral in terms of matchup equality, or they slightly favor certain types of character playstyles.  Nothing too drastic or hard to deal with, but it can give a slight edge if you're losing a set and you need to pick a stage to get back into it.  Since the stages are so varied and in some cases volatile, the stage list is incredibly small compared to what's available.  

All these restrictions and rules can seem claustrophobic and unnecessary to people who don't want to engage with that scene.  After all, why would you turn off all the items in Smash, and only play on 7 stages?  Why would you cut out over half the game, just for a competition?  Why go through the headache of tailoring and fine tuning your team with perfect stats, natures, and moves, instead of just leveling up your favorite to 100 and using all damaging moves to roll enemies?  

Well, because you can.  And this is what's wild to me about both Pokemon and Smash.  They're both easy breezy enough to pick up and play with no stress, or you can theorycraft and get as deep into the execution part of it as you want.  Do you want to just take your trusty Charizard and roll through the game?  Hell yeah, go for it.  Want to craft that perfect para-flinch Togekiss that will try to rob your opponents of over half their turns?  The power is yours.  It's really a testament to these games' design that they can support both of these playstyles so well.  You can get as much out of them as you want, and that's appealing to some people.  Competitive play and speedrunning have a lot of similar DNA.  A lot of times, people will get into a game they love and try to get as much out of it as they can.  And that's really cool to me!  At some point, when you finish your first playthrough, you think to yourself, "Man, I want more of that" and you look and see what else the game has to offer.  It's neat to see.  

While I'm here, I'm also going to give a narrative shoutout to Dark Souls.  It's a very similar thing in that aspect.  You can take the game at surface level, but if you want, you can get deep into the interpretive nature of the lore.  While it's not something I'm into, or could pay too close attention to for a variety of reasons, i will say making a game where that's possible is a feat unto itself.