Everyone knows this is a fun game with friends. All of the Smash games are, that is their sole purpose. Fun with friends. There is no balance to be found here, no real quality control as far as glitches and mechanical failures are concerned, and it has a roster that's probably a lot larger than what the dev team could handle. Much like Mario Party, nobody minds because it's not meant to be balanced or leak-proof. It's meant to be fun with friends, and falcon punching people is just really satisfying.

Now I'm going to talk about the elephant in the room because why not. The melee community, with no reservations, is the worst fighting game community of all time. It's the equivalent of Hearts of Iron for grand strategy, or League of Legend for mobas. I will get into some of the reasons why.

Reason #1: eSports culture and how Melee fans formed and promoted the worst parts of it. Genuinely, especially during the game's heyday, the top players (of which was a small handful of what can, with some retrospection, be described as cult leaders) were awful human beings. Complete unwashed shit heads that had zero respect for anything that wasn't their precious Melee. The community, in turn, garnered a similar reputation. Rules about washing yourself before events became a trend. Being a fucking asshole was normalized to the extreme because it was a spectacle, something that was and is a very nice tool for corporate sponsors to rake in so much more cash than any player could. Leffen was banned from competing in his home country of Sweden because he was THAT bad. Melee's competitive "soul" is a fraud. When you dig into it, you come to understand that yes, these players were indeed being assholes on purpose for financial gain. Unfortunately that rubbed off on not only eSports, but your average fighting game player as well. I'll end this section with this: There is a reason why you rarely see women at fighting game events.

Reason #2: Busted controllers and the piss babies that use them. Back when Melee was on the EVO mainstage (thank god that's over) top players would use very specific original GameCube controllers with a rare set of malfunctions. When I say rare, I mean 1 in 50 controllers had it, and they could easily stop working at any time. There was a case where one of the top Melee players literally dropped out of a major tournament because their busted controller stopped working and they refused to use a normal one, in case you wanted to know how important these controllers were in competition. You see, in any other game event, that would be called cheating. Not only do these special piss baby controllers give an unfair advantage in the form of allowing what is considered basic movement tech, but they also did a looooot of gatekeeping. You see, if you want to pick up Street Fighter, you just get a still-manufactured controller and go. Whether that's an xbox controller or a fightstick, the barrier is relatively small. With Melee? Nah son, you have to shell out cash for a controller that has not been manufactured in over a decade, and you have to make sure it's this busted ass version which, let's be honest, is probably gonna jack up the price more. Add in the fact that you need an original GameCube or Wii plus a CRT, all of which are also no longer manufactured. Utterly deranged and shows how anti-competitive the top rung of the scene really was.

Reason #3: Entitlement. So, I hinted at this in the first section, but this is another issue that is both hilarious and aggravating. Remember what I said about the top Melee players not respecting other games? Melee had the most EVO runs of any game. You have to understand what this entails for the full scope of the problem. For Melee, old CRT's and original consoles had to be sourced, leading to a logistical nightmare for EVO staff. Not only that, but as a reminder, they were also hosting the Melee community. Imagine the smell. Imagine being a female employee. So despite these problems, Melee got more EVO runs than 3rd Strike. It got more runs than any Marvel vs Capcom game. It ran over Skullgirls as a main event, a game that is not only more well made but also desperately needed the limelight. What makes this even worse is the fact that the creator of the game thought this was fucking stupid. The evo slot would've been more useful if it was either filled with proper fighting game royalty or newer titles that needed the exposure. Instead, we got the same 5 players that showed up in every single Melee finals. Remember what I said about gatekeeping with the controller thing? Yeah, I wonder why there was such a lack of diversity in such a hugely popular game.

This culminated in what can only be described as the Piss Baby Olympics. The year Melee was finally removed from the EVO lineup and replaced with unist, Samurai Shodown, and Smash Ultimate. I will link a video in an edit later so you can enjoy it like I did. The reactions of top players genuinely made me giggle. They were furious about this. One of them called for Ultimate fans to boycott evo. All of them insulted the new games in the lineup, including fighting game royalty in Samurai Shodown. They looked at unist as some random anime game. Smash Ultimate, of course, was not taken seriously, because they could no longer use their busted ass 1 in 50 no longer manufactured controllers and the game was actually not built like a sack of rotting horse shit. And now, in the year of our Lord 2023, there is no possible way Melee will become another main event at EVO and quite possibly any other major either. Nintendo, in a rare positive example of their draconian ip grip, shut down a large Melee tournament that was being hosted on a modded emulated version of the game. Not only that, but Nintendo stated that their games will no longer appear at evo, instead opting for their own sanctioned event which will, naturally, include the latest Nintendo releases that are actually being sold. Play another game.

Link to Piss Baby Olympics: https://youtu.be/h7O4zOXALIY