"Ready? Go!"
sounds of sporadic plastic clacking
"Game!"
loud sound of plastic thudding against wall
grown men screaming out of anger

Melee's knockback formula is like my E=MC².

The beautiful, dense web of the state machine behind its character controller is like my Starry Night.

So many things went right with Melee. The open ended damage percent and ring-out systems interact gorgeously with the way the game treats each character as its own physics object moving through the simulation. Flexible mechanics like wavedashing, DI, SDI, the depletable analog shield, and the tech system create near limitless potential for expression in offense, defense, and even basic movement. A single jump in Melee has 5 separate decisions baked into it that determine where you'll land. The open ended nature of the game combined with its extremely high execution ceiling reward dedication to technique, highly nuanced matchup strategy, and situational awareness like perhaps no other game.

20 year Melee veterans will boot up tonight and pull off some wild shit they've never seen before, and if pressed about it they'd just tell you "I knew it would work."

It is the intuition-based fighting game.

There will never be another game like Melee. Dead serious. There is nothing quite like Melee, this beloved, messy, antiquated, old-enough-to-drink party game that somehow masqueraded as a Thinking Man's fighting game long enough for this game to become the face of fighting games and fighting game communities. Melee drives grown men fucking crazy. People will break their fucking fingers playing this game. Pro players will casually perform the most delusional and rapid-fire input combos just to make Fox cough a little faster. The screams of "WOMBO COMBO", "HAPPY FEET", "THAT AIN'T FALCO", and "WHERE YOU AT" may sound like confusing chaos to the uninformed, but long, resonant, pitchy screams of triumph and terror like that are home to those who just know. Melee is a fucking menacing game where you will get your ass whooped over and over and over and over again. You'll seethe, you'll sulk, you'll screech at pitches you didn't even know you were capable of reaching, and every single time you'll utter "fuck this game" with the most acidity imaginable before ruefully picking up your purple controller and giving it another go for the hundredth time. Because you never know, you just might get lucky and go down as the world's 4th Best Dr. Mario main. You just might be the guy that unlocks a crazy-ass exploit with Zelda that changes the meta of the entire game. As unintuitive and chaotic and confusing as Melee is, you just might win this time, and that keeps you going, because the art of getting good at Melee is a strangely rewarding process. The Dark Souls of party games.

Admittedly, one of the biggest reasons it's so hard to be good at this game is because it's fucking broken. Approximately 8672% of the meta is just learning to exploit dumb shit in the game's unbalanced programming. Ledge camping and invincibility frames. L-cancelling. The wavedashing exploit that Sakurai thought was irrelevant and wound up changing the meta of the game forever. Fox's Frame-1 Shine, the best move in the game. Peach's busted-ass Down Smash, Falco's beefy-ass Down Air. The Ice Climbers' infamous "Wobbling Infinite". Marth's ludicrous grab range, the busted nature of grabbing and chain-grabbing as a whole.

This menagerie of crazy-sounding and technical bullshit is just part and parcel to the experience of anyone with even a passing interest in Melee's meta, but holy shit, have we ever stopped, stepped back and considered: "hm, maybe all of these famous techniques we've relied on... are actually the result of hilariously broken programming? Programming that had no choice to be broken given that this game was feverishly and hurriedly developed in only 13 months?" Speaking of which, ding ding ding, there's your answer as to why this game's so haphazardly slapdash. And Melee doesn't even bother to hide the cracks in its game design most of the time. The C-stick controls the fucking camera in single-player mode instead of smash attacks like it normally does. Game and Watch's shield doesn't even cover his full body. You can easily escape over half of Kirby's throws. Hell, Kirby himself is a disasterpiece of coding, going from one of the best characters in 64 to easily one of the worst in the entire roster, a roster full of characters you won't be playing as in competitive because most of them suck. Why? Because this is a party game.

Melee is a party game that uses fighting as its hook, the gimmick it uses to market itself. HAL and Sakurai never even intended for the series to be competitive until wayyy later. Why else do you think Melee has items? Why else would it default start with Timed Mode, a mode that approximately no one uses compared to Stocks? Why do you think 70% of the banned levels focus on being goofy, gimmicky, and visually distinctive instead of being 'competitively viable'? Because in spite of Smash's incredibly unique nature as a fighting game (the concept of forcing players out of stage boundaries instead of just wailing at their health bar is a genuinely inspired idea), it was always meant to be casually enjoyable. And casual fighting games don't bother to balance themselves, because it's all about the enjoyment that you and your friends n family get out of it. That's honestly what makes Melee such an interesting game from a competitive standpoint. It is competitively garbage, an absolute trashfire of interesting and barely-functioning mechanics that absolutely do not work together in harmony... except for those magical moments when they do and you're watching some absolutely maddening high-level play between a Fox and a Jigglypuff. Melee is a legitimately exciting game to watch and play when you can visibly see the techs and tactics on the screen and the visible stress and focus on the players' faces. And maybe that's what makes Melee competitive. Not the actual mechanics, but the feeling of raw, undiluted competition it inspires in the deadly-serious people that can recite the frame-by-frame movements of a talking fox and a singing ball of fluff.

And that's why I love it. Melee is very casually enjoyable, and at its most competitive, there is nothing quite as electric and over-the-top energetic as high-level SSBM gameplay. Sakurai worked for 13 months straight around the clock, doubtlessly killing himself in the pursuit of perfection, hoping he'd able to give the Gamecube the Killer App it deserved. I'm sure he expected the game to be successful, but I doubt he fully expected just how generation-defining this goofy little fighter wound up being. The dogged and restless development cycle of Melee may have pumped out a game with visible fractures spiderwebbing all over its' silly exterior, but it pumped out a blockbuster game that continues to be relevant and highly sought-after twenty years later.

And it hasn't even been ported to any other system! (PS, Don't shill out a ludicrous amount of cash for Melee unless you really want the feeling of holding the case in your hands. Grab Dolphin, emulate the game, and activate the cheat code that lets you instantly unlock all the characters. You'll thank me later.) 4 / 5.

I remember I saw a dumb tweet when Smash 4 came out. In a video, a guy was holding the new game in his hand, talking about his excitement to get back into the series. But it's a ruse. He suddenly throws his copy of the game in the trash. All that's visible now is what he was holding under it: a copy of Melee. He says "Ten more years", and that's it. It was a joke, funny because of how obnoxious you'd have to be to believe it, but now it's inevitable.

I was finally able to fall down the Melee hole thanks to Slippi. I have some understanding of the competitive scene, but I'm finally getting my hands dirty. It's the only Smash game that I've never really played. I've loved every one of them so far. I found out, much to my disgust, that the purists and evangelists and snobs were right. This is the good one.

Obviously, I'm playing this online with people that may have actual decades of experience with it. I am getting obliterated out there. Maybe not every single moment is fun, but I don't care. This rules.

The depth is so apparent, even from my perspective. From what I can tell, the best character in most Smash games is apparent in a few months. This game is, what? 20 years old, and the metagame at the highest levels is still very alive. There's apparently still some light debate over the best character. One tutorial and you ask yourself "Wait, they're doing HOW many inputs, just to jump?" and you can see just how much they had to patch over in sequels to keep it Nintendo-friendly. And the debate over how much of this depth was even intended will always be fascinating to me.

A lot of that doesn't concern me, obviously, but even at my level you can still get these little mini-moments of competence that make you feel like a fighting game genius. The first time that I: 1) Did the inputs for a wavedash, 2) correctly, 3) in a game against a human, 4) at a time that made sense, all to 5) transition it into something that gave me an advantage. The first time I comboed a throw into rest (I know, I'm sorry). Presumably, I did an L-cancel correctly once. Who can say for sure though. I mostly just drone on here about RPGs, but no RPG can give you a feeling like that. I know it's a cliche to say, but it's not just numbers getting bigger on a screen (as much as I love seeing numbers get bigger). You, the human, are progressing, not a character, and I'm not sure any other game has made me feel that quite like this one.

Whether I slide into the skid and sign up for some beginner netplay tournaments, or I bounce off of all this in a few weeks or months, I've certainly gotten my zero dollars' worth. I don't think there's ever going to be a game like this ever again. A cute mascot game with 20+ years of gameplay depth hiding in there, resented by its creator, kept alive by a community, even after three attempted replacements by that developer. This might be my favorite fighting game of all time.

I do not at all care for this game's competitive scene nor can I do the glitchy tech that competitive players do, but from a casual standpoint it has a good amount of single-player content. It has the best version of the target tests, a bunch of cool, unique trophies to unlock, a handful of modes and a few minigames, a roster twice the size of the original game, a bunch more stages, and the classic & adventure modes are enjoyable modes to play through. Compared to Smash 64, it's a big step up, but compared to Brawl and other later installments I'd say it isn't quite as good. It still excels in some aspects compared to them though such as having the best trophies and target tests.

“Ready…?”

Super Smash Bros. Melee harkens back to the last time a Nintendo was truly socially cutting-edge; there is a sleek, new-millenium feeling to every nook and cranny of its existence. Characters are allowed to look starkly “off”, designs regularly feel bizarre and shift into complete reimaginings for the sake of aesthetic unity, and someone had the insane and beautiful idea to backdrop all of this with one of the most breathtakingly dynamic and bombastic scores in video game history. All of this, with just about a year in the oven.

Being that Melee was my childhood Smash Bros. - I didn’t obtain a copy of Brawl until well into my time sunk into Melee and so the majority of my experiences with the title were relegated to friends’ houses- I think the single-player opportunities feel the most “Smash-like” and familiar to me. I mentioned in my Brawl retrospective that I’m admittedly not a huge fan of the Subspace Emissary. Largely, this stems from both its labyrinthian and oftentimes poor level design and the fact that much of it feels unrepresentative of the essence of Nintendo’s properties. Granted, Melee’s Adventure Mode isn’t perfect, and I do agree with the criticism that its ambition peters out near the end of the run, but to have the entire arcade-like experience so closely tied to the franchises the cast is representing is really awesome. I feel particularly that the Super Mario, Zelda, F-Zero and Metroid stages do a great job of replicating the feeling of their respective series, and the way certain character unlocks - Luigi in particular - are tied into the mode is really charming. Classic Mode returns in full force with its best rendition to date, and I never felt like returning on the higher difficulties and plowing through the mode to satisfy unlock conditions became all that cumbersome, especially having a friend to trade off with. In fact, I love that Melee offers you both a Vs. Mode criteria as well as single-player options to unlock the majority of the cast. I opted for the latter this time around and found myself exploring basically every single mode Melee offers to completion as a result. Events are a godly addition that just ooze imaginative and curious concepts. Some are slightly bogged by weird AI, but ultimately the experience of tackling the big 51 is a rewarding and memorable experience. And of course, All-Star is a wonderful adaptation of Kirby Super Star’s Arena mode, complete with an incredible arrangement of the Great Cave Offensive’s save area theme. Melee’s single-player opportunities allow so much exploration and rewards the player with new characters, stages, and especially hundreds of trophies around every corner. It’s dozens and dozens of hours’ worth of fun, such a massive step up from the original and, in my opinion, the true birth of Smash as a “historical document” of gaming history as well as a truly incredible and innovative series in its own right.

“Go!”

The cast of Melee is just iconic at this point - true, much of the newcomer line-up are clones, but on the other hand, Smash now feels incomplete without any of them. There’s a reason that fans cheered upon the return of Roy, Mewtwo, Ice Climbers, Young Link, and even Dr. Mario and Pichu after their respective absences. Control over your character has never felt so full-throttle and complete as it did in Melee. I’m a Sheik main and when I’m really into it, I feel 1:1 with my character at pretty much any given time. And frankly, even if some of the roster doesn’t hold up in competitive-level tier lists, I still find characters like Ness and Bowser to be a joy casually. Every character feels like the right call to represent their corner of Nintendo’s world circa 2001. The stage picks back this up, with the odd asterisk denoting the absence of a Fire Emblem stage. (I believe the rumor goes that what became the first version of Brawl’s Castle Siege started life as the scrapped Akaneia stage?) But Jesus, that stage selection - so many iconic stages debuted here; Fountain of Dreams and Temple being my two favorites in the entire series, the most iconic version of Final Destination, the (slightly bad) first rendition of Battlefield, the (much better) Yoshi’s Story - the Melee stage selection is mostly bangers, and the stinkers are pretty ignorable anyways. Frankly, I think Melee offers a pretty incredible casual experience for both the single and multiplayer crowds…

But let’s be honest. That’s not Melee’s legacy.

“Game!”

Despite the understandable esoteric presence it holds within the greater fighting game community, I think Super Smash Bros. Melee is perhaps not only the scene’s most bizarre and curious phenomenon, but perhaps the single most emblematic example of grassroots community and ardent love of the game because of, not despite, its flaws and imperfections. On paper, Melee is an incoherent, jarring, jank-ridden mess of a game. But, that’s okay - in execution, it’s an incoherent, jarring, jank-ridden mess, too. That’s what makes it so interesting. That’s what makes every single idea and feature and glitch and oddity stand with one singular heartbeat behind it. It’s also why its creator resents it, and why the publisher refuses to give its rabid community the time of day. Super Smash Bros. Melee stands in the face of everything Nintendo as a corporation represents - it’s a beautiful disaster held up by a community that perseveres through each and every blow they’re dealt because enough of us recognize it for the accidental masterwork it is. In a sense, it’s gloriously ironic. It’s the anti-Nintendo game that somehow dominated the GameCube’s sales numbers. It’s outlived Brawl, geared mods towards reconfiguring that title into a proper competitive successor, it out-popularized Smash 4, the stalest, most generic entry of the series through its entire life span - and frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re hearing the distinct aural harmony of clacking plastic shoulder triggers and the “bli-bli-blips” of multi-shines well after Ultimate has kicked the can. Melee is forever. It’s more than a game - to many of us, it’s a purposeful and deliberate stand.

“This game’s winner is…”

When I was seven or eight, I journaled my progress in unlocking every character and stage, with drawings, in Super Smash Bros. Melee. Unravling the GameCube controller to the sounds of the opening FMV, every single time, brings me back there. A wonderous achievement in both confident intent and glorious accident.

20+ years later and it Melee is still, by far, the best Smash game. Has the best single-player content in the series, to start. Adventure Mode does a great job at showing the worlds of the different fighters (Subspace eat your heart out), and is very replayable, unlike something like Ultimate's World of Light or Brawl's Sub-Space Emissary. Also, it's just fun. REALLY fun. Classic mode is also a great time, and the fact it's different each time (and that the Break the Targets is customized to every character) keeps it feeling fresh every playthrough. Melee's Event Mode is also my personal favorite Event Mode in the series (though Brawl's ain't bad). Most events feel really creative and unique from each other, other than the occasional blip here and there. Some of my favorites are having to defeat Pikachu using only Pokéballs, protecting a Yoshi Egg, defeating two Nanas, battling 128 tiny Marios, and The Final Showdown against Mewtwo, Ganondorf, and Giga Bowser. There's also All-star & Stadium which are very fun side modes, and I'm glad you can access the Break the Targets stages without having to play Classic Mode to play them lol.

Moving on from Single-Player stuff, Melee is also extremely fun with multiplayer, and where the game truly shines. One of the big misconceptions about Melee I see people have now is that the only reason people like it is because of the competitive scene, and I think that's blatantly just false. Even if you don't know the first thing about how to do some of the advanced tech in this game, it's still very fun to just casually play with friends! It's easy to pick up, even now. The roster may be small, but I feel like most characters are very fun, which I can't say about some of the later games. Ultimate is surperior in the size of it's roster, but you also have some characters that just... aren't very fun, like Banjo & Kazooie & Piranha Plant.

Moving on to extras, GOD I love the trophies in this game. Maybe it's because I'm so used to the extremely lack-luster spirits of Ultimate, but going back to Melee and seeing all of these trophies (some of characters that never had 3D models previously) and neat little tid-bits of information about them is really cool. Getting a Sound Test after unlocking everything, while hardly revolutionary, is much appreciated with how good this game's soundtrack is. Many of the remixes in Melee are still the definitive version of those songs for me, especially (going off the names in the sound test) Great Bay, Temple, Brinstar, Corneria, Pokémon Stadium, Big Blue, EarthBound, Icicle Mountain, Fire Emblem, & Dr. Mario. Also the original music is amazing. I really don't think there's a single bad song in this game.

To finish this off, Super Smash Bros. Melee absolutely still deserves the legacy that it's held for the last 20 years, and is still the "Ultimate" Super Smash Bros. game to me. I hope Nintendo can make another Smash game that can recapture everything that makes Melee so beloved one day

I'm a casual gamer who steadfastly refuses to play online multiplayer for anything and who isn't close to playing competitively. But even then, I don't see how this being the most skill-intensive iteration of SSB is a bad thing. Because unless you're getting into the competitive world of shuffling/wavedashing/moonwalking, the skills involved with this game are not based around memorization of long combo strings or special inputs. The button combinations to pull of any move are incredibly simple, and the kind of skill required with the game lies in intelligent positioning, good timing, and judicious choice of moves.

The single-player game has a ton of content as it is, but it's still the best party game I've ever played, for any combination of players at almost all skill levels (if the skill gap is too high, just add plenty of items and play on a map with hazards to increase randomness and equalize the playing field somewhat). And it's just so much fun.

(mained Falco and Sheik)

My first experience with Melee was at a McDonalds on the drive up to my grandparents house where they had a bunch of Gamecube consoles in the play area. At the time, the only character I was familiar with was Donkey Kong from my Donkey Kong Country games for the GBA. The game nevertheless left a huge impression on me, and would only continue to blow my mind a couple of years later when I got my hands on a Gamecube.

Melee expands on the first entry in the series so extensively that it's easily the greatest leap in the franchise so far. It's still a massively popular esports game thanks to its razor tight gameplay, speed, and mechanical depth. It was so much fun turning the items on their highest setting and just going wild on some of the craziest stages, but the fact Melee can also be taken so competitively is at the core of its excellence.

Melee adds a ton of new modes. There's a crack at an Adventure Mode though it's really just a variation on Classic. More exciting are the challenges which are all creative and get genuinely very tough to make your way through. Generally there's so much to do from collecting trophies, playing the home run derby, or running 64-player tournaments.

There are complaints to be had with the roster, which has more "echo fighters" than you'd want to see. Still, it's a much expanded group of characters from the first game and there still feels like there are plenty to choose from. Melee really brought it with the stages though, which included many of the very best of the whole series. There's a reason Temple comes back in every single Smash Bros. release.

As a near-launch title for the console, Melee was the absolute system seller for the Gamecube and a must-have title for literally anybody who owned the console.