Advanced Techniques are a strange beast in Smash Brothers. In Super Smash Brothers: Melee, for the Nintendo Gamecube, there are tons of them. Wavedashing, L-Canceling, SHHFLing, the list goes on. People in the community love them, and for good reason. They add depth by increasing complexity, and they also give you options. They mean that a player can have more choices to make, and they let the player express themselves better. They speed up the game, they provide areas for people to challenge themselves, and to learn. Learning how to wavedash feels like an accomplishment, because of how hard it is. Being able to L-Cancel your aerial attacks makes your character feel more responsive. They make the game better in they eyes of almost all competitive Melee players. But I don’t like them.

I guess it’s because they feel weird. They change the game in ways I suppose are positive, but it still feels alien and strange, even though on a mechanical level I understand them. I know how wavedashing works. A player can airdodge, which sends them in a direction. If they do it into the ground immediately after jumping, the momentum is transferred into a slide, which makes sense, I guess. When you look at it from the perspective of someone being told about it, or as something to learn, it isn’t the most unintuitive of things. The problem for me lies in the fact that, as a child, these techniques were never a part of my smash picture. They are not in the manual, or even in the strategy guide. They aren’t something you get taught in the game. They aren’t even found out by most players until they start watching tournaments. They’re hidden, so when I saw my first tournament, I had no idea what was going on. I didn’t even feel like the pros were playing the same game as I did, because it was so different from the game I played as a child. It felt like Mars, and I didn’t think to bring my spacesuit.

I’m wasn’t, and am not, sure if I like this bright red planet. I liked it the way it was before. I liked the fact that everyone walks the same way. I liked that the difference between me and my brother wasn’t that he could wiggle the stick and mash the buttons better, it was that he understood how to attack better, how to punish better, how to position better. The skill gap was not about doing something difficult with the controller, because all of those things he beat me with were not hard to execute. It was mental. It was about who was smarter, and understood their options better. And he had the same options I did. There was nothing technical. It was all in the mind, and that appeals to me.

People love AT’s though, for all the good reasons I said at the beginning, and are upset they are not in later installments. They ask “How do they hurt the casual player, who doesn’t even know they exist? They can keep playing as they always have played.”, and really, they are right. AT’s don’t hurt casual players who know nothing about them, as evidenced by the hundreds of hours I spent playing Melee as a small child. They do not hurt purely casual players. They do, however, inconvenience some casual players who try to learn about competititve, and find to their dismay that the game they wanted to watch is not the one being played. It’s a different world, and as stated previously, the jump to Mars is jarring, and strange. Not bad, but different, and for me, less enjoyable because of it.