It really wasn't that bad.
Back when I was in high school, my PS3 was my baby. I got it on a deep sale long after the 599 US Dollars controversy had blown over, and I was working my way through a back catalog of three generations of whatever Playstation titles I could get my grubby teenage fingers on. This was before retro games were being sold at a king's ransom, so my saved-up lunch money went towards acquiring those instead of anything new. If I wanted to play the latest titles, there was really only one option; my best friend, Kevin, also only owned a PS3. One day after school, when I went over to his place to playtest his latest RPG Maker puzzles and compare our Skyrim builds, he whipped out a copy of Playstation All-Stars Battle Royale. I asked him what it was, and he said it was like Super Smash Bros..
It wasn't, but that was what made it interesting.
What is it with every platform fighter and wanting nothing more than to be Smash? You've got all these titles like Rivals of Aether, Brawlhalla, that one Nicktoons game with no voice acting, Multiversus, the works. All of these games play like one of either Melee or Ultimate, and none of them are even remotely close to the Nintendo originals. Rivals of Aether, at the very least, has an incredibly active modding scene, but the base roster is made up almost entirely of boring Smash Bros. mashups with the exact same gameplans and tech options as their counterparts. It's all so bland. It's like a store that only sells a single loaf of pumpernickel and a thousand loaves of Wonder Bread; the imitators aren't interesting, and there's so many of these identical things all clamoring for some of the market share of the actually good one.
Playstation All-Stars, for it's many faults (which we'll get into), at least tried to be mechanically different. There's no percent or life meter, which means that normals and specials never kill; your only options for finishing off an opponent are to land a super on them. Each character has three levels of super they can build, with your Level 3 supers usually opening you up to as free of a kill as you could possibly get. Throwing your opponent drains their meter, giving you a risky offensive option that can lock them out of a kill if you can land it. There are some legitimately interesting gimmicks here beyond the tepid "build percent, knock them off the ledge, get the kill" loop that every platform fighter seems beholden to. Just because Smash did it doesn't mean you have to copy its homework. It's not hard to tell when average students are stealing answers from the valedictorian.
The real problem here, frankly, is that a fighting game is defined entirely by its characters. Combofiend infamously said before the release of Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite that "characters are just functions", and the entire internet rightfully clowned on him for it. People will play garbage if it means getting to play a character they like. Just look at how many revisions of Street Fighter II there are. Sorry, that was low. Anyway. Sony doesn't exactly have the most killer roster, but they've had mascots throughout the years. There were a ton of fan favorites that people had to look forward to: Crash Bandicoot, Spyro the Dragon, Solid Snake, Cloud Strife. It wasn't like Nintendo was gonna put them in Smash. Cloud wasn't even on a Nintendo console.
But then the game came out, and it had the DmC: Devil May Cry version of Dante. And Fat Princess. And the Big Daddy from Bioshock. And, uh..."Nariko"? From Heavenly Sword? Solid Snake and Cloud Strike eventually did make their way over to Smash, and a lot of iconic Sony characters ended up left off the roster. It was a confusing choice, and it was immediately clear how much of this cast was put together for marketing whatever franchises had new games out at the time, and how few of the ones that celebrated Playstation history made it in. There were still decent pulls — like MediEvil's Sir Daniel Fortesque and Toro Inoue, the Playstation Network Japan mascot — but people were annoyed enough at the omissions to call it a pretty forgettable cast.
The balance isn't really there, either. It's not going to be that big of a problem if you play it in a fairly light, casual scene (which was no doubt the intended experience), but there wasn't ever a chance that this was going to be played competitively. Even if it was, nobody would ever pick anything other than Gravity Rush's Kat, and games would be the exact same boring slapfights determined by who landed their touch-of-death combo first. Some characters are just genuinely too good in a 1v1. They did end up releasing a few balance patches over the game's lifetime, but there was too much time between them for nothing nearly substantial enough to be noticed. It was a title in desperate need of long-term support, and it didn't get it the way that it needed to.
This is way more of a budget title than it should have been, and it shows through these little cracks. What a strange game not to dump money into. This was as close to a first-party title as you can get without literally being first-party; Sony published it themselves, and they handed development to a studio that they created. The story mode cutscenes waver between camera pans over still images and in-engine renders. The sales cracked a million copies, and that still wasn't enough to support a game that feels like it's had this many parts left off of it. The studio got canned immediately after release, and the DLC was handed off to Sony Santa Monica. This whole thing is so obviously wrong. It reeks of mismanagement. Playstation All-Stars might have been a much stronger game if whatever was clearly going on behind the scenes was resolved before these issues became immutable.
It's still a decent enough party game overall. It was never going to be Smash, but none of these other infinitely more boring Smash clones are Smash, either. There's one king, and then a bunch of pretenders to the throne. At the very least, Playstation All Stars attempted to do something new. Whether or not it worked is irrelevant; nobody else even tried. Please stop trying to make every platform fighter into Smash. This genre is damned to a slow, stagnant death if we can't iterate at all on the foundations of a title that started four console generations ago.
Back when I was in high school, my PS3 was my baby. I got it on a deep sale long after the 599 US Dollars controversy had blown over, and I was working my way through a back catalog of three generations of whatever Playstation titles I could get my grubby teenage fingers on. This was before retro games were being sold at a king's ransom, so my saved-up lunch money went towards acquiring those instead of anything new. If I wanted to play the latest titles, there was really only one option; my best friend, Kevin, also only owned a PS3. One day after school, when I went over to his place to playtest his latest RPG Maker puzzles and compare our Skyrim builds, he whipped out a copy of Playstation All-Stars Battle Royale. I asked him what it was, and he said it was like Super Smash Bros..
It wasn't, but that was what made it interesting.
What is it with every platform fighter and wanting nothing more than to be Smash? You've got all these titles like Rivals of Aether, Brawlhalla, that one Nicktoons game with no voice acting, Multiversus, the works. All of these games play like one of either Melee or Ultimate, and none of them are even remotely close to the Nintendo originals. Rivals of Aether, at the very least, has an incredibly active modding scene, but the base roster is made up almost entirely of boring Smash Bros. mashups with the exact same gameplans and tech options as their counterparts. It's all so bland. It's like a store that only sells a single loaf of pumpernickel and a thousand loaves of Wonder Bread; the imitators aren't interesting, and there's so many of these identical things all clamoring for some of the market share of the actually good one.
Playstation All-Stars, for it's many faults (which we'll get into), at least tried to be mechanically different. There's no percent or life meter, which means that normals and specials never kill; your only options for finishing off an opponent are to land a super on them. Each character has three levels of super they can build, with your Level 3 supers usually opening you up to as free of a kill as you could possibly get. Throwing your opponent drains their meter, giving you a risky offensive option that can lock them out of a kill if you can land it. There are some legitimately interesting gimmicks here beyond the tepid "build percent, knock them off the ledge, get the kill" loop that every platform fighter seems beholden to. Just because Smash did it doesn't mean you have to copy its homework. It's not hard to tell when average students are stealing answers from the valedictorian.
The real problem here, frankly, is that a fighting game is defined entirely by its characters. Combofiend infamously said before the release of Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite that "characters are just functions", and the entire internet rightfully clowned on him for it. People will play garbage if it means getting to play a character they like. Just look at how many revisions of Street Fighter II there are. Sorry, that was low. Anyway. Sony doesn't exactly have the most killer roster, but they've had mascots throughout the years. There were a ton of fan favorites that people had to look forward to: Crash Bandicoot, Spyro the Dragon, Solid Snake, Cloud Strife. It wasn't like Nintendo was gonna put them in Smash. Cloud wasn't even on a Nintendo console.
But then the game came out, and it had the DmC: Devil May Cry version of Dante. And Fat Princess. And the Big Daddy from Bioshock. And, uh..."Nariko"? From Heavenly Sword? Solid Snake and Cloud Strike eventually did make their way over to Smash, and a lot of iconic Sony characters ended up left off the roster. It was a confusing choice, and it was immediately clear how much of this cast was put together for marketing whatever franchises had new games out at the time, and how few of the ones that celebrated Playstation history made it in. There were still decent pulls — like MediEvil's Sir Daniel Fortesque and Toro Inoue, the Playstation Network Japan mascot — but people were annoyed enough at the omissions to call it a pretty forgettable cast.
The balance isn't really there, either. It's not going to be that big of a problem if you play it in a fairly light, casual scene (which was no doubt the intended experience), but there wasn't ever a chance that this was going to be played competitively. Even if it was, nobody would ever pick anything other than Gravity Rush's Kat, and games would be the exact same boring slapfights determined by who landed their touch-of-death combo first. Some characters are just genuinely too good in a 1v1. They did end up releasing a few balance patches over the game's lifetime, but there was too much time between them for nothing nearly substantial enough to be noticed. It was a title in desperate need of long-term support, and it didn't get it the way that it needed to.
This is way more of a budget title than it should have been, and it shows through these little cracks. What a strange game not to dump money into. This was as close to a first-party title as you can get without literally being first-party; Sony published it themselves, and they handed development to a studio that they created. The story mode cutscenes waver between camera pans over still images and in-engine renders. The sales cracked a million copies, and that still wasn't enough to support a game that feels like it's had this many parts left off of it. The studio got canned immediately after release, and the DLC was handed off to Sony Santa Monica. This whole thing is so obviously wrong. It reeks of mismanagement. Playstation All-Stars might have been a much stronger game if whatever was clearly going on behind the scenes was resolved before these issues became immutable.
It's still a decent enough party game overall. It was never going to be Smash, but none of these other infinitely more boring Smash clones are Smash, either. There's one king, and then a bunch of pretenders to the throne. At the very least, Playstation All Stars attempted to do something new. Whether or not it worked is irrelevant; nobody else even tried. Please stop trying to make every platform fighter into Smash. This genre is damned to a slow, stagnant death if we can't iterate at all on the foundations of a title that started four console generations ago.
3 Comments
that SFII line goes hard
Great review! Maybe it's my thing for Smash clones, but this is one of those games I really think would benefit from a sequel. If Sony could give it a bigger budget and iron out some of the gameplay and roster issues it has the potential to rival Smash. Apparently Crash & Spyro were too expensive for them and most of the other developers pretty much told them they could only use what we got iirc.
PasokonDeacon
1 year ago