*smash is not a fighting game

All I can think of at the moment x )

Basically anything to do with Melee and pro players.

But Rest is so OP... her lovely PING! if you get it just right. Delicious.

ganoncrotch said: Basically anything to do with Melee and pro players.

Are you referring to those that suggest the other installments in the series have their own merits, or those that feel that anyone who doesn't worship Melee is to be treated like an imbecile???

Too many swordsmen.

Not a real fighting game because reasons.

All the Fire Emblem characters are clones.

Nintendo is failing because Wolf was removed from the Smash Bros. roster.

The Melee crowd belittling anything not Melee.

Smash being competitive =/= Smash being catagorically a fighting game. It's a party brawler. That's a different genre. Not even the game's creator thinks it's a fighting game. Your mistake, as well as the mistake of the writer of that article and the mistake of literally everyone who incorrectly want's to believe that it is a fighting game, is thinking that party brawlers can't be competitive or demand difficult execution. They can and Smash is proof that they are. They are just doing it in a different genre. Guess Pokemon can't a JRPG franchise now because it has a highly competitive scene and has also been featured in fighting game tournaments. That must be a fighting game too. I mean, it's a game where two players with health bars fight each other in tounaments with other health bars after all. Saying that it Smash is "not a real fighting game" is equally stupid. That's just saying it's a "fake" fighting game instead. It's just not a fucking fighting game, period. It's a party brawler. If you want to call it something that sounds less "casual," call it a platform brawler, but it's not a fighting game. And while we're at it, neither are Powerstone or even Pokken. That's not an insult or a discredit - that's an accurate catagorization.

Bastardizing the default mode in Smash until it can more closely resemble that of a fighting game game doesn't magically make it one. That's like saying that MK8 is a racing sim when you play without using items recieved in item blocks, in Baby Park only, and you have to break every time you bump into someone so you nullify the speedboost. That's like saying  "Ninja Gaiden 3 is totally a fighting game when you play online with only two players in a confined space. It's more demanding competitively than any modern fighter." I'm sure it would be more conpetitive. It would just be a very competitively and excecutionally demanding multiplayer mode in a 3rd person action game, and not a fighting game. The same way Smash is a party brawler with a highly technical, highly competitive, and highly popular community created multiplayer ruleset, and not a fighting game.

Fighting games are a catagorical genre, not a qualitative badge of honor. Stop treating them like one. 

There exist sub genres. Smash is an party brawler that exists within the fighting game genre.

Your MK8  comparison is off. MK8 is an arcade racer, so it is pointless to compare it to a racing sim, but since racing sim and arcade racer are sub genres of racing, it is perfectly valid to say MK8 is a racing game.

The bold breaks your point. You're flat out incorrect. A fighting game is not a game "where characters fight." Pokemon fight. Not a fighting game. Dante in DMC fights. Not a fighting game. The Links in Triforce Heroes fight. Not a fighting game. Characters in Dinasty Warriors fight. Not a fighting game. Dante in DMC fights. not a fighting game. The idea that the definition of a genre is a loose as players doing what the word in the name of the genre describes is absolutely absurd. Sonic Lost World isn't suddently a racing game because there is a mode where you can race in it. That doesn't make it a subgenre in the racing genre.

Same goes for Smash. Party Brawler isn't a subgenre of the fighting genre, just like the JRPG isn't a subgenre of fighting games now because Pokemon has been in fighting game tournaments. 3d fighters like Tekken and Soul Calibur are a subgenre of the fighting game genre, not Smash. Smash is a party brawler - a completely different genre. Smash has been in fighting tournaments because it's a popular game who's audience type can overlap with that scene in a fighting game tournament. That's it. It's proof of nothing more than popularity.

And it has absolutely never been truly defined as a fighting game. That's why people like you get so upset about it. The consensus isn't there because it doesn't exist. Not by me, not by the creator of the franchise, not by nearly enough people for the sentence "Smash is not a fighting game" to not be one of the most recognizable sentences in the gaming industry. There's nothing to prove. If anything, it's a subgenre of platformer. It is absolutely and most definitely not a subgenre of fighting game.

I love some good old "smash is/is not a fighting game" discussion