Smash Bros. sucks

[Final-Fan]

I think ZenfoldorVGI has nailed the "house of cards reinforced by piles of bullshit" nature of the OP overall, and several individuals have pointed out the ridiculous and wrong nature of key specific assertions.

Notably, Grey Acumen gave a positive refutation of the "SSBB style sux vs. traditional fighters" argument (showing SSBB's depth-in-simplicity), while Renar (among others) gave a negative refutation of the same (showing that the OP was wrong to equate complexity with depth).

Now, a refutation or two of my own:

Onyxmeth said:
It's hard to imagine anyone toting this fighting game as their favorite ever if Nintendo mascots weren't your playable characters. Without a shadow of a doubt, this would have been a nice bottom feeder fighter like Power Stone and would have been forgotten quickly. This is a game built off the strength of it's cast as opposed to the strength of it's gameplay. I'm not saying the game plays bad at all, because on the contrary I find it very fun the short amount of time I've played this series. It's just that, there's a reason no one cares about Power Stone and Small Arms but eat up Smash Bros. and Jump Superstars, and it ain't the gameplay.

Hm, BenKenobi88 has already taken his shot while I was working on this, I see, but I think I'll still take a run at it.

I think that what you misunderstand here is that the strength of the cast is not just that they are stars of beloved games but that they are individualized fighters, each with very distinctive styles, personalities, characteristics, etc.  There is so much moaning when there are a few characters out of DOZENS which are not radically different from all the others.  The forgettable games you mention -- well, I'm not familiar with them, but I would wager that they do not have any such remarkably individualized fighters.  And even more importantly...

Onyxmeth said:
If you slap the cast of Square Enix against the gameplay of Ehrgeiz, i'll put good money that a lot of people will claim it legendary, regardless of the awfully designed engine powering the game. I've noticed many people on this site proclaim that they don't like fighting games but love Smash Bros. and consider it one of the greatest games ever. They are the people he is speaking about in his article. It's hard to like a game in a given genre and not like the genre it was built from, unless your reasons for it have nothing to do with the the gameplay.

On the contrary, the gameplay of the Super Smash Bros. games is a vital part of its success.  Seriously, I should NOT have to explain this.  It's a well-known fact that the SSB games have practically created a whole new fighting game genre unto themselves.  The entire OP article is based on the OP author being unable to deal with the massive success of the SSB series as opposed to the traditional fighters and their combo-memorization-based gameplay.  I'm sure that many people buy SSB games due to the fanservice and Nintendo name, but if they truly didn't like the gameplay they wouldn't play the game for very long now would they?  And yet used copies of SSBM fly out of stores as soon as they come in.  If it was truly the power of the Nintendo brand duping these people into buying SSB games in a genre they hate then we would fully expect Melee to be clotting these places like Madden games.