| Yoshiya said: Actually, I agree with Astro in saying that we should assume everyone is scum, no matter their character. Consider these three points; 1) Prof HATES flavour hunting. It effectively ruins the point of the game and makes it so that the game is less about reading people and more about who is what character and how well you know the lore (you could claim a character that seems good from a quick research but an experienced person in that lore could know that said character spent a brief time under the influence of the evil characters for example). 2) Smash is all about the free-for-all aspect. What's fun about Smash is that you can pit any two characters you want and see them fight it to the end. Peach vs. Mario, Luigi vs. Link, all those kind of match ups are possible. As such, surely if you want to stick with the flavour we're working with, it would make far LESS sense for only the evil characters to be mafia and only good characters to be town as that's not how it works in the game itself. 3) What about the neutral characters like Wii Fit Trainer or Dog Hunter Dog? (not got the game so I'm not sure on the official name of the latter). How would they fit into the flavour? You could say they're good by default of not having ever done anything bad but at the same time they've never really done anything good either have they? They just show up to the Smash Bros arena and start kicking ass for no good reason. Prof might have left such characters out for this reason but then that just defeats the point of it being a Smash based round where anything is possible.
I'll agree with the comment about the playable roster though, it sounds kind of like what people were saying when they were joking about Mr. Saturn being the Watcher and seems kind of parrot-y to me. |
Consider this then:
1. Then why have flavor? I'm well aware prof isn't crazy about it, but that would just mean he'd put in something to make it harder to guess just from the flavor. Prof himself made use of flavor last game by looking at the kill posts to glean information about the scum team. As long as the flavor isn't written such that it does all the work for you, but gives you enough that when you finally find the bad guy, it's satisfying ("Yeah! We got Ganondorf!" Not, "Yeah! We got...Mario?") The past two games were not ruined by flavor hunting. Instead flavor hunting just added a bit of...flavor.
2. True, but then it all becomes really arbitrary. Link is scum because he just is, while Ganondorf is town because he just is? Smash may have teams, but it doesn't lable one team good or evil. So in a game like mafia where they are, the analogy doesn't work. But there is a way to make sense of it. People always want more villains in Smash, you see threads with the coming of each game counting how many villains are in the new game. Then you have Subspace Emissary, where the villains all teamed up against everyone else. Villains are still viewed as evil by the fanbase and developers alike.
3. Hmm, I guess "neutral" characters probably could go either way. That could be how prof gets around the issue of making flavor hunting too powerful. The scum team could be composed of pure villains like Ganondorf, with things like Ice Climbers thrown in to keep people guessing. Flavor would make a joke about how the Ice Climbers actually club baby seals with their hammers or something (they do in the Japanese version), while Ganondorf's would just say he's the King of Evil.
My issue with the Mr. Saturn comment is that it was Astro that made it, and then he makes the comments about how non-playable characters might be in the game while things you might think are town actually aren't. It just sounded too much like he was trying to build a bogus claim while being able to attack townies on their claims. But I guess you're right, some characters aren't really heroes or villains. I maintain, however, that the bit about non-playable characters being possible is bullshit. 50+ characters in the history of Smash and prof is going to pick an item or assist trophy? Yeah right.
