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This year's EVO is chock full of the best fighting games to grace the world within the last few years, with the oldest being Mortal Kombat 9 (well if you don't include games that were re-releases, then Street Fighter 4 would be with MK 9 too). However there is an exception this year, Super Smash Bros. Melee. The 12 year old fighting game was added to the main roster of this year's EVO after winning a charity donation drive to get the 8^th spot at EVO, a spot ironically it had gotten many years ago in past EVOs. This is unfortunately this is an all too common reality for the Smash Bros. Community: an seemingly endless fight for acceptance in the fighting game community. A fight that is slowly shifting towards in favor of the Smash community but not fast enough.

The debate over Smash Bros as a fighting game has always perplexed me so much. Most of the confusion for me is about the merits against Smash Bros' lack of tradition ascetics as a fighting game. In other words, its usage of percent damage instead of health bars, how to win you need to literally knock out opponents out of the ring, items usage and stage hazards, etc. There are some merits to those arguments, however Smash Bros can exhibit the same competitive edge as seen in many other modern fighters. Hell, Smash Bros has the luxury of having all three of its entries being played competitively. Melee, however, is considered to be the best and most competitively suited. Why do you think Sony used Smash Bros as their template for Playstation All-Stars: Battle Royale? Smash is deceptively simple yet can still have the technical flair that most modern fighting games exhibit. Nearly anyone can pick it up and enjoy it....but it takes real skill and dedication to master it.

It's competitive matches like the one above that make Smash Bros both fun and hyped to watch...as well as ask what else is there to prove that Smash Bros is a fighting game? Melee has been featured at EVO before and so has Brawl. This year the Smash community donated over $90K towards charity to be featured in the EVO line up and has over 700 participants schedule to participate come Friday. This isn't a small group of people. Smash tournaments happen all over country and world. The first small fighting game tournament I went to had one along side MVC 3 (and that actually had more people participating in it than Marvel!). Smash is everywhere and growing especially impart to the development of Smash Bros 4. There really isn't any need to question its credentials as a fighting game...OK, maybe in a few areas.

Probably the one reason that I do agree with that questions Smash Bros' fighting game credentials is its randomness. Sure the randomness of items and stages is mad fun for a casual environment but its chaotic and a pain for hardcore/ tournament players. Thus, in most tournaments, players use stages with flat surfaces or no stage interactiveness and with no items. On one hand this solves Smash's randomness but can lead to some really limited matches. I'm side with no items with competitive matches but I love them when I'm playing casually with friends. Besides, randomness is an esstanlly part of Smash as well as fighting games in general. Its random moments like this that make our genre both equal fun to watch as it is to play.

The other reason against Smash I kind of understand is Super Smash Bros Brawl. Brawl is a very divisive game in the Smash community. As much as it there to like about the game, there are plently reasons to to hate it as well. Those include more randomness in the stages, Final Smashes, serious character imbalances, and worst of all, tripping. Unlike most modern fighting games, Nintendo never fixed via patches or updates. Fans, on the hand, did. Thus, the infamous Brawl hacks were born. Beyond just doing the silly fandom stuff, a competitive set of hacks were made to fix the problems of Brawl. Some hacks were universally praised, like the ones that removed tripping (which I think were all of them), while others were a bit controversial with nerfs, buffs, or the outright removal/replacing of characters. Ignoring the legal implications for a second, this divided the Smash community as a whole and probably confused the casual competitors who might not have known what was going on. Hell, I'm not going to lie and say that I know the full details myself. I used to follow it very closely but after awhile it got too confusing to decipher and I had moved on to a PS3 to really care. I do have commend those Brawl hackers though for helping keep Smash alive. In most modern cases with fighting games, Brawl would largely be considered “dead” and nothing more would be said. The hacks might have divided the community but it most certainty kept in the public eye.

 

As Melee returns to EVO, the future of the Smash Bros series looks bright with Smash 4 Smash Bros lead producer Masahiro Sakurai, still states that the newest Smash “is designed to be sort of targeted at the centre, intermediate players” according to an Kotaku Australia interview. With that in mind though, Sakurai acknowledges tournament scene and enjoyment that people get from playing Smash Bros at high levels. While Smash 4 is still pretty deep in development, it already seems like it has a focus on pleasing both casual and hardcore alike. Whether that will translate into Smash 4 being apart of the tournament scene though is still unknown.

 

At end of EVO 2013, how the fighting game community will react to Smash Bros is still one of uncertainty. Despite being 3^rd with most participants at this year's EVO, there will always be people who question its merits as a fighting game. Some of those questions have weight to them, some of them don't. Even though I think of Smash Bros as fighting game, I'm not mad at anyone who doesn't and I'm not asking you to change your stance (despite how Pro Smash I sounded in this piece). To everyone I leave you with a real good message from Skull Girls' Community Manager Mike Z after Skull Girls lost the EVO charity drive (but still got into EVO via an official side tournament):

At the end of the day, the Smash Bros community will still be playing and will still be smash. Always have and always will be.

Feel free to leave your thoughts, good or bad, about Smash Bros and their apperance at EVO below. See you tomarrow.