What I Learned From Playing Super Smash Bros. Ultimate with YoSquid (Includes Hytale Insights!)

Image from SmashWiki

It's been VERY long since I last played Super Smash Bros. seriously. The last time I did so was on August 22, 2016, when I used up all 30 plays of the Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS demo. The last time I did it not as seriously was in early 2020 back in game development class where I got rekt by everyone else, including the girls who aren't hardcore gamers at all, in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.

Despite not having played any Super Smash Bros. game for a long time, I feel like I have to learn at least one of the games. #1, as a Hytale nerd and tactician, I have to be knowledgeable about weapon types since I assume, just like other games, traditional weapons like swords, bows, etc. will be the primary, or at least most popular, way of dealing damage (though considering the many possibilities advertised by the game, we might also be able to perform improvised combat similar to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild). #2, some of my Japanese kid students talk about it and I need to know what I'm doing from the perspective of a casual player who's new to English, not someone who uses competitive terms like "edgeguarding".

Unfortunately, combining our currently low family salary, the increasing prices of pretty much everything due to both the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine War, and our frugal personalities, a Nintendo Switch is out of reach for our budget.

So, last May, I scheduled a visit to YoSquid's house to play some Super Smash Bros. Ultimate (which, starting from here, I'll simply refer to as Smash). We agreed to do it on June 9 since he'll be on summer vacation and won't be running any family errands or something.

We played for 4 hours straight from 5 PM to 9 PM. Though I made YoSquid aware of my real purpose for playing the game, we still legitimately had fun with each other as we constantly tried to one-up each other and improve our gameplay. YoSquid at the time hadn't played Smash for two months so, combined with not having seen any competitive Smash matches or tips, he was the perfect test subject.

How I Played Smash vs. How YoSquid Played

I completely forgot the controls and had to re-learn them from scratch as I played, so I played Mario who was my main back in the Nintendo 3DS to hopefully make things easy on myself. However, I was very rusty and I did not enjoy Mario's low damage; he seemed to be more focused on hitting foes strategically and precisely. (Note that I did very little research on the game's basics before going to YoSquid's house.)

So I experimented with other characters, many of which I like or mained on the Nintendo 3DS. I tried Peach, Pikachu, Donkey Kong, Fox, Mewtwo, Pokémon Trainer, Captain Falcon, Marth, Lucina, Ryu, Ken, Chrom, and the Mii Brawler, but guess the two characters I enjoyed the most and mained? Little Mac and Robin.

Image from SmashWiki

These two characters have fun fighting styles that are similar to how I fight in real life.

Little Mac is a boxer who happens to wear green boxing gloves by default. I'm not used to fighting mid-air in this game so his powerful ground attacks are perfect for me. YoSquid HATES how fast and hard Little Mac hits and I used that to my advantage by constantly charging toward YoSquid, catching him in a flurry of punches, or juggling him mid-air with what's basically a Shoryuken. Sometimes, I also trolled him with a counter or two (which I do a LOT more often IRL but struggle to do in video games).

Robin feels more strategic considering his role as a tactician. Of course, when in doubt, I get close and mash his neutral attack and watch YoSquid as he freaks out seeing his character get battered by a bajillion wind blades. I don't use Thunder a lot and when I do, it usually misses unless I quickly mash it instead of charging it, but Elwind lets him recover very quickly while Arcfire is fun for trolling YoSquid if he tries to get up close and personal.

YoSquid uses a wider variety of characters.

The ones that annoyed me the most are the ones with projectiles (Mega Man, Samus, Yoshi), heavy hitters like Bowser and the Ice Climbers, and those who run over foes as they move like Inkling and Wario. (Every time I see that motorcycle, I want to break something.)

His main, though, is Meta Knight, and boy did I hate being constantly charged at. I lost every single match whenever he used Meta Knight.

Overall, YoSquid seemed to play simply for the fun of it, even though he did occasionally stomp me. Both of us are willing to play together again at some point--I'm not sure when, though, but I'll be back with more research for sure.

How I Can Use This Knowledge

Students

I would normally organize this alphabetically but I wanted to get the shorter and more boring part out of the way first: talking with students about Smash.

Japanese people in general are shyer than Westerners (including Filipinos which are geographically Eastern but culturally Western) and this goes double for teens and younger. I think that's why kids answer seriously and on a need-to-know basis only just like when I talk to people I try not to get emotionally attached to.

I just realized that humility is also a stronger virtue in Japan than in the West so it turns out it might be inappropriate to ask Japanese people about their performance in sports or video games. If you win and brag about it, it's the sin of pride. If you lose and admit it, it's shameful; it's dishonorable like you're dishonoring an imaginary shogun and your pride as a warrior. (Yes, Let's Ask Shogo did a video about how bushido is the root of many social problems in modern Japan.)

What YoSquid has in common with these kids, though, is that he does not care much about winning or losing. What he doesn't is that being a Westerner culture-wise, he also doesn't care about saying he won or admitting defeat. All that matters is they had fun.

I admit that I get irritated when I hear or see opinions made of vague statements and/or one-sentence answers, whether or not they're from native English speakers. Anyone can simply call, say, the low-tier Donkey Kong "strong" and call it a day without providing an explanation like, say, winning about 80% of matches against friends or making someone rage.

Perhaps I can focus more on the real-life relationships built by playing Smash. To be more specific and to distinguish it from other hobbies, I can also ask questions like "Why Smash? Why not other hobbies?" (Actual wording may vary based on the student's English skill level and how casually or formally they speak.)

Hytale

Alright, here's the more fun part: the one you've been waiting for. Let's do this.

Modding Weapon Mechanics

One more takeaway I learned from YoSquid's playstyle is something I vaguely remember from the creator of the Super Smash Bros. series, Sakurai Masahiro: that Smash was never intended to be a competitive game. I think he is disappointed as well by the fact that only a small handful of characters among a huge cast are played in competitive matches.

I think the paradox of video game balance is that, no matter how much developers try to create a balanced game, there will always be imbalances. Players always find new ways to play a game or find situations where a certain character or weapon performs poorly despite being considered "S-tier"; that's why, for example, Bennett and Xingqiu from Genshin Impact used to be considered mid-tier until players learned how to play them properly, thus catapulting them to top-tier status. Barbara, a pure healer, was interestingly S-tier before but is now low-tier because people realized there are healers who heal faster and more reliably on top of additional offensive or defensive utility like an ATK boost (Bennett) or a shield (Diona).

Hytale, thankfully, is not like most competitive games (including Genshin Impact). Based on how I interpret the advertising, the game is very easy to mod and players can auto-download "modpacks" used by a modded server simply by attempting to join. (It's more to me like playing custom Warcraft III maps where all you need to download are the maps; nothing else. The custom files are already included inside one map file.)

If you're not satisfied by how a certain weapon type is balanced, for example, you can simply change up some numbers like damage, attack speed, stamina costs, and signature move "energy" costs and gains, or you can go advanced and learn 3D animation and Java programming so you can create your own combos with unique effects. (Or just download mods from skilled animators/programmers.) Other players will then use these changes with no extra effort on their part.

Babies and little children often learn things by copying what others do. That's pretty similar to how I learn a lot of things; for example, I say "firetruck" like in the Smosh song, I say "まさか" (masaka/no way) like anime characters, and when I was learning Unity, the Unity Manual was my best friend in writing code. I need to reconfirm, but I think I'm legally allowed to copy a bit of code from vanilla Hytale scripts to assist in my own coding. TL;DR: I can probably use parts of Hytale's code as templates.

As such, I anticipate that there will be very few complaints towards Hypixel Studios itself regarding competitive balance. Most complaints would instead be made toward server owners since they're in charge of balancing their own servers.
Perhaps whatever balance-related complaints Hypixel Studios will receive will mostly be from players, especially content creators, who insist on playing vanilla for the purpose of challenge runs like speedruns since speedruns are often done with unmodded games.

Roleplay-wise, this is also incredibly useful. If you want to focus entirely on the story or if you're really angry at a certain enemy type (*cough* Nobushi *cough*), you can just make a wooden sword one-hit-kill everything and have infinite durability. If you want choreographed fights, you can make weapons that deal 0 damage or attack really fast, especially for things like Japanese martial arts.

So, where am I going with all this sheer flexibility?

You can basically adapt Hytale to the needs of you and your players. Using YoSquid's D&D and Smash playstyles as a reference, he likes playing with new things, so I want to make exploration rewarding for him by giving him a lot of magic weapons and armor to play with. He hits me with a lot of Final Smashes so maybe I could give him weapons that speed up signature move charge rate. In D&D, he also jokes about killing, stealing, and modern-day stuff like a "credit card" so I could make sentient NPCs like Kweebecs react accordingly (and hope I can stay true to their canon personalities).

Transferring Smash Techniques to Hytale

Player characters in video games typically have minimal resistance to interruption similar to human-sized or smaller enemy Mooks. YoSquid exploited that fact in Smash by annoying me with Inkling, Mega Man, and Samus. Only a few attacks have very little hitstun (in Genshin Impact terms, poise damage) such as Mario's Fireball and Pikachu's Thunder Jolt.

From my experience with playing Minecraft PvP as well as what I've heard in the League of Legends community, competitive players who don't do e-sports for a living are very prone to raging when a battle doesn't go their way. I think constantly interrupting the enemy would greatly lower their morale while leaving them open to follow-up attacks, assuming they don't increase their resistance to interruption. Aside from shields and the dagger's signature move, I don't see a whole lot of ways to increase resistance to interruption.

(Note that I don't do unsportsmanlike behavior like insulting other players. The worst verbal or written thing I would do to them is to use quips kinda like Spider-Man's.)

(Also, I hope Hytale won't allow players to permafreeze each other. Permafreezing enemies in PvE is fine, though.)

Unlike Minecraft, Hytale allows for a bit more aerial mobility thanks to the default jump height being 2 blocks plus the ability to climb heights of up to 4 blocks from a standing jump.

In Smash, YoSquid exploited a height advantage like crazy when, despite disliking Lucas, he stayed in the air most of the time and spammed the heck out of PK Thunder on my Little Mac who couldn't even reach Lucas because Little Mac is terrible in the air. Needless to say, I raged.

While the height gained from a jump with no climbing is still negligible, if a player who mainly uses AoE ranged attacks (especially those with secondary effects like slowing movement speed) makes it to high ground, they're practically unstoppable. All they have to do is keep air-dashing with daggers to travel as fast as possible until they can climb to a higher place then repeatedly rain Death from Above with, say, a snowstorm or tsunami. (I did not talk about pillar-jumping because of the delay between jumping and placing blocks leaving the player vulnerable to melee attacks. Climbing an existing ledge is faster than pillar-jumping.)

You could also take inspiration from one time I played Minecraft Annihilation: I stayed on high ground and waited for 2 enemies on opposing teams to kill each other. Once the fight was over, I killed the winner by going invisible and taking him down from above. You can do something similar with Plunging Attacks from daggers or maces (maces require signature move charging).

Bonus Concept: Rallying Pole

Weapon Type: Spear

Rarity: Epic (Genshin Impact likely equivalent: 4-star)

Damage: 10-14

Durability: 90

Attack Speed: Fast

On hit, grants up to 3 nearby allies stacks of the Motivation effect, increasing their damage by 1 and reducing the damage they take by 1.5 for 12s. Normal Attacks grant 1 stack, Charged and Plunging Attacks grant 2 stacks, and signature moves grant 4 stacks. Max 4 stacks. This effect can be triggered once every 0.3s. This effect ends immediately if the affected ally is attacked by the wielder of this weapon.

Bonus Concept: Spear Signature Move

For 3s, the character rushes forward with their spear, piercing through foes along the way and dealing heavy damage. The player can freely change direction during this move.

(Tip: This can be performed multiple times on a single enemy or once per enemy in a multi-target battle.)