The amount of depth to defense is probably what i love most about melee. The way people's offense must adapt to cc, SDI, light and power shielding, slide off, shield dropping, amsah techs, etc. is unmatched. Like in strive the only thing i think about is how below celestial, 9/10 bursts come right after i use red RC.

Listening to blurs commentary

The Toph AMA videos are currently my favorite Melee content. Such a variety of analysis and personal answers.

My regret is not taking care of hands/tendons sooner or least more consciously. I always thought 'no pain no gain' and was playing for years without proper rest. I thought I could just do the gamer stretches and that was some cure-all. I thought I could wait a day or two if my hands hurt but one day I just couldn't open my left hand. So after years of pt I've accepted its just a bit too late for me. I don't think I'll be able to compete in melee again but I'll always love the game and play casually from time to time. I got a decade out of the game or so and that makes me happy enough.

Toph - "I wouldn't f* with anything" Also Toph - "I would just remove it (Wobbling)."

15:47 guy in the chat accidentally types "marty" instead of "marth" lmao

Unrelated but I love the background for your stream, it just looks very homey and inviting.

Toph, your content is so insanely good, better than any other smash channel rn IMO (except like, AsumSaus, but that's different LOL). I have been watching your videos for like two years now and I don't think I have missed more than a handful, you are so entertaining and your videos are always a great watch. I am really glad you maintain such a good KZfaq presence because I'm usually too busy to catch your streams. Keep it up!

Rivals of aether not having shields and less defensive options doesn't make it objectively worse than melee. Personally I also like the PM roster A LOT more than melee. That isn't really a coincidence that I gravitated towards those two. The character designs are pretty similar. I'm also excited for rivals 2. It honestly just looks like Furry project M lmao. I agree with the pace of the game thing. As a rivals TO, most games are 3-4 minutes long if that. It makes running tournaments SO much easier.

I've been in the melee scene since the MLG days. And it's always interesting that people argue for mechanic changes for new players. But do we really have issues with getting new players? I've seen new players pop-up constantly and they rarely complain about the things non-players complain about.

Came to Melee for the offensive options, and stayed in Melee for the defensive options.

Mine is not finding out about the game until last year.

That I never got to compete. If life didn’t happen I would’ve been competing in like 2005. Oh well at least slippi is a thing.

My melee regret is not caring about the competitive side until just a few years ago

Mine is not playing against n0ne before he became ranked. I live in Nicaragua and was an active member in the melee workshop texture hacking group and he noticed some of my falcon skins. He sent me a message asking if I was really in Nicaragua (this was prior to him moving to Canada mind you) and he wanted to play some friendlies with me but he was in another city. I played like dog sh!t back then (still do but now I can put up a fight lol) so I chickened out since I didn't want my ego to be shattered. Little did I know that he was to become one of the best in the world and that was a golden opportunity back then to learn more about the game. This was like 9 years ago lol

it's funny how you bring up rival's neutral. because you are right, but that's also what makes it interesting (to me at least) it makes the learning curve of "everything is a zero death -> overcompensating by trying to play neutral to -> everything is a zero death" really satisfying

My random change for melee I'd maybe put 3 stocks games. To help those long floaty matchups be lower and spacies games are quick regardless. But 4 stocks is so ingrained in the culture, it would be hard to change. (it used to be 5 looong time ago)

if there was a mechanic that I would remove from melee, it would be L-cancel. it makes the tecg skill unnecessary difficult and doesn't add options, you just have to do it

So you said you wouldn't change any melee mechanic, but i want to ask since nobody brought it up, what about phantom hits?

1:27 - IMO no ledges is actually an improvement over Smash. In Smash, the ledge has historically been the hardest thing to balance and causes more harm than good overall. Melee comes closest to getting it right, but even then you have ledge invul that can be abused. Plus, IMO, off stage edgeguards are always more exciting that even Melee's subtler recovery mixups.

For me the biggest thing is hitstun and animation durations in general. These are really the two things that dictates how lame and uninspiring the combo game is. If the animations end instantly there is no risk that makes the combos interesting and if there is no hit stun combos can't be mixed up whatsoever.

My biggest Melee regret happens circa 2016. I mentioned that Melee looks cool, so a smash 4 player showed me "Melee Is Broken" to tell me that smash 4 was a better game and I actually believed that trash fire of a video. Missed out on so much melee, all of Armada, everything that happened then. I wish I could tell my old self to watch melee back then!

i really hate the argument that the angel platform is a comeback mechanic because it also applies to the winning player. if each player gets a mechanic equally it isn't a comeback mechanic it's just a mechanic. if you're up 4 stock to 1 and you die, you get the angle platform despite having 3 stocks and them having 1. that's not how comeback mechanics work lol.

imagine a universe where wobbling was banned i feel like ices would be far more progressed than they are now

I was at Ceo and I walked up to this guy to play friendlies and I didn't get a good look at his face. Turns out it was sharkz and he just kept talking about wobbling while doing some of the nuttiest chaingrab combos I've ever seen. Got real discouraged. Didn't play during wobbling but if icies can do all of that without it, I'm glad

Hey Toph, you should do a 1.03 tournament edition review/discussion soon! It looks good but I've seen very few people talking about it on yt

While fast fallers are well represented in the top tier, I wish there were more of them overall in the cast

I would remove port priority and add grab clanking. also toph, palatable is pronounce like PAL-it-uble not palATEable. like your tongue's palate, something tastes good or it doesn't, if it's good on the palate it's palate-able

wobbling is funny and i will die on this hill

4:30 - A good reason why there will probably never be another Plat Fighter quite like Melee. If Melee came out in the modern era, the game would probably have been patched. And all these "mid tier Peaches" might become high tiers or top tiers. Modern Melee might see Samus or Luigi hella buffed. A modern plat fighter that wants to emulate Melee's style will essentially have to intentionally make any non-fast faller intentionally worse.

Before watching this video. My biggest regret is not attempting to run slippi on my laptop earlier. I always had thought you needed to have a decent gaming computer with the fancy shit to run melee online and so my playing was always limited to when someone who played came over or when I went over to my friends house who played netplay. Turns out, not that hard to run and my laptop runs it just fine. Years I could've been playing and honing my skill wasted.

not starting earlier - i played the game occasionally as a kid and started watching tournaments in 2015, but was too intimidated by the game to actually play until last year... really wish i'd picked it up all those years back

In terms of platform fighters, I've been playing alot of the Rushdown revolt and it's kinda sick

really wanna see that video about cc, I argue for it against a few oldschool friends a lot

not picking up melee sooner, since i started back in like 2015-16

I refuse to play melee because j cannot get past the controls. Every platform fighter after melee just had actual control options. I already hate tap jump because I don't ever want to use it. I don't like playing characters where it means a great deal. Secondly I can't remap every button, in every game, PM, RoA even SSF2 I've remapped every button to fit my needs. I can't play melee because whilst I can remap on dolphin I can't do it in person. The other reason is one of the characters I played heavily in PM, Kirby, isn't worth anything in Melee, I play Shiek and Marth but moreso because they're good. If I could pick characters to play forever it'd probably be Link, Kirby and Samus but realistically I'm just making it harder for myself. Melee is a great game and realistically I'd be fine with no balance changes in exchange for more control options, and also B Reversing and Glide Tossing. Realistically I like PM because if the tech options it has mostly.

This is full of hot takes

I will always say that L-canceling is a silly mechanic. Yes, there are timing mix-up’s when you hit a shield, but a mechanic that is never bad to utilize is not a good one. Edit: there should be auto-l-canceling. Thanks to Latías for the reminder to add this

my biggest melee regret is wrist problems lol

This might drastically shift the edge guard game in an unhealthy direction (especially for fast characters with good aerial drift like Falcon against limited recoveries), but I always thought foot-stooling was probably the best (if not just most fun) mechanic that came from the newer smash titles. Another edge guard related hot take I still hold is that edge hogging is at least a boring mechanic that allows for lazy and noninteractive situations due to the combination of ledge invincibility and strange "ownership" traits of the ledge such as after rolling or get up attacking from it. I don't think ledge trumping was the best solution to this but I also can't easily think of anything better so idk. I'd also say pocketing your double jump even after your up b starts moving would be cool, but because of tap jump (and especially the buffer window along with it) it would be very hard to utilize in any significant manner so probably wouldn't add much of anything.

I kinda just Want Melee with Ultimate style of effects, particles and trails for the moves, it would be so sick

2 videos in 24 hours L E T S G O

Melee without cc would be a nightmare

if wobbling wasn't a thing we wouldn't have sad m2k :(

Toph, check out Fraymakers, it looks badass

What mechanic would I remove from Melee (Smash)? Remove any form of 'mashing to get out' for grabs, shield breaks, bury etc. Such a stupid mechanic.

I get what Toph means by less floaties relative to spacies being good for Melee. But I subconsciously feel like that means less of ppl like me is good 😢

"no defense" is hella cap, also nasb has been updated a shit ton In MVS you have a INVINCIBLE DASH, meaning if ur at a point where u want to shield u can instead just dash jump, and the airdash in general in the game is incredible in rivals it still has the RPS of grab shield attack but instead its parry jab attack, which does the same thing u cant just hold a option

Project M every character can touch of death combo you and some options are just too strong

Im gonna save my arguments for that, spends 15min deep diving the topic

imagine the only counterplay to a situation is to run away from the fastest, hardest hitting character in the game =_= Complain about wobbling, but wobbling is only negates the complexity of punish game, and even makes neutral more interesting (and adds variety) in some ways. respawn on the other hand, negates the complexity of neutral. which as you say yourself is the most sacred aspect of melee nobody gets right. plus, it simply helps the top tiers disproportionately. quite lame. i would nerf it, probably by half. for ledge invuln id probably do it character by character doing very slight nerfs here or there, and for wobbling, id remove it, but make handoffs more consistent, and buff/fix nanas AI

Not stylin harder

CC is actually adds something to the game. L-cancelling does not

"melee is the only game 20 years later people still play" starcraft players be like: ...

Yo

What year did players start CCing everything?

a thousand percent agree that crouch canceling is sick

following the trends of hating melee as a modern smash player for so long bcs its "too sweaty"

Your argument about the floaties being the majority of the top tier cast is a little off to me. Your argument is that if floaties were the most op we'd be bored with 8 minute matches. If the game has a different cast of tournament viables the meta and tournament rules would've been based off that. Instead of 4 stock 8 minutes maybe it would've been 2 stocks 3 minutes to keep things moving. You assume that if we changed to floaties as majority of viable tournament characters that all the rest of the rules would've been developed to the same point.

Before you ask me to comment imma comment get read, and if you don’t ask me to comment ah ggs gottem I guess

11:12 No offense, but thats an ignorant statement. Starcraft to name one. I can name atleast 15 more off the top of my head.

rush down is so underrated

"Melee is the only game that's 20 years old that people still play" I agree with pretty much every take you have but this is the first one that I actually disagree with you. Starcraft: Broodwar is still going strong in Korea (Not as strong as LoL but still going strong imo) and it's the game I actually compare Melee too a lot, both have a ton of unintended mechanics that make the game more in-depth and reward game knowledge and an ungodly amount of practice. If you had said "Melee is the only 20 year old game that is still played competitively in North America", then yeah I think that's a more accurate statement.

you had me until calling crouch cancelling (especially with how broken it is in melee) a good mechanic

NASB is a garbage videogame which is prob why u dont like it

This is some Fox propaganda