LogFAQs > #978711883

darkknight109 posted...

Character unlocks, Adventure mode, the trophies - all were at their absolute best in Melee.

I think character unlocks and trophies were better in Melee just because it hit a sweet spot for the number of them. Starting with 14 characters and unlocking 11 is a good number: Enough base characters that you don't feel deprived if some characters take longer to unlock (and are therefore more satisfying when you do get them), enough unlockables that you feel like you have something to work toward, but not so many unlockables that the unlock process feels like a slog. Similarly, the number of trophies was high enough for 100% to be a genuine challenge (including several with really difficult unlock conditions), but not so high as to be disheartening. Subsequent games had so many characters that unless they're being unlocked quite rapidly, it'd feel like a huge chunk of the game was walled off and that you had a significant ordeal ahead of you, so they kind of had to streamline the process a bit (though I think a single run of SSE unlocking them all was a bit much). Trophies kept the Melee structure, but because there were so many, trying for 100% was a lot more daunting and less tempting than it was in Melee (similar to how I'm never going to even try for 900 korok seeds in BotW/TotK).

Trophies also ran into an issue from Brawl onward that we can't really blame on the games themselves: In 2001, most of us were able to learn new information about Nintendo's history from trophies. The Internet was still relatively new (Wikipedia didn't even exist), and a lot of the characters and games featured in Melee were actually totally unknown to many of Melee's players, especially in the west. By the time Brawl rolled around, though, there had been 7 more years of information being exchanged, Western players learning about Japan-only games that might otherwise have been introduced to them through Brawl (in part because Melee kindled an interest), emulation and the VC giving people an opportunity to learn about pretty much every retro game that was high-profile enough to be featured as a trophy, and enough active discourse around Smash and which games could be featured in it that people already knew most of what the game could teach us. There just aren't any surprises left in Nintendo's history that Smash could teach us that we can't/haven't already learned elsewhere, which kills a lot of the magic that Melee's trophies offered.

Of course, part of that's just getting older. Internet or no, I was inevitably going to know more gaming history by age 19 than by age 12. I can't necessarily speak for what experiences current 12-year-olds would have playing Ultimate for the first time and comparing that to my experience playing Melee, but even so I'm pretty confident saying that the games featured/referenced by Ultimate's roster and trophies are less obscure now than those featured/referenced by Melee were in 2001.

I'm also now realizing that Mr. Game & Watch was as old when Melee released as any character from 2003 would be in a Smash game released today, and I'm not sure I'm quite ready for that realization. Still, it illustrates the point kind of nicely: In 2001, Mr Game & Watch was a piece of obscure ancient history that most of Melee's players had no first-hand experience with and knew nothing about. I can't think of a single character introduced in 2003 (or thereabouts) that would fill a similar role of being both too old and inactive for modern audiences to recognize but also a significant part of gaming and Nintendo's history.