Can any Smashfags here explain to me how Melee's Competitive scene has not only survived for 15 years since its release...

Melee is the least "restrictive" this means it has a higher skill ceiling but it also means its the most broken and the least balanced

Smash Bros. 4 is more restrictive, thus has a lower skill ceiling but its also the most balanced

Smash 4 has a competitive scene much larger than Brawls but not as big as Melees (despite having sold more copies) and overall I think the reason is because of legacy (and Autism)

Marvel 3 only needed updates to survive however Capcom lost the license to Marvel so they couldn't do anything with it. Its meta never grew and nothing new was really discovered so hype and players died off slowly. Not even sure which of the 2 is even better. I would rather play Tatsunoko VS Capcom.

Why the hell did they think it was a good idea to put it on the Wii?

Saying that I think 2 Smash games at EVO is too much. Pokken is also boring to watch compared to most fighters. AnimEVO has a much larger variety of games than the main stage. However I'm sure they don't want anime fighters on the main stage because it could push people away.

One character in Melee is more complex and can be played in a greater variety of ways than the entire cast of Sm4sh.

inb4butthurtSm4shfags

Fact: Nobody who is really good at Melee thinks it's a bad game, and nobody who is good at both Melee and Sm4sh thinks that it's better. There is no reason for this thread. It is simply a mindless venue for le ebin autist meme.

Also Sm4sh is worse competitively than Brawl.

You almost had me until you said this

And before some faggot misinterprets this, I clearly mean that none of them think that Sm4sh is better.

Brawl is way more complex and has a much wider variety of ATs than Sm4sh. Pretty much everything fun, unique, or interesting about Brawl was nerfed or removed in Sm4sh. Yes, the balance is by far the most atrocious of the series, but even a Metaknight ditto in Brawl is more exciting and complex than the entirety of Sm4sh, and most of the top Sm4sh players (who are all former top Brawl players pretty much) agree.

Also after 15 years of metagame development I guarantee you that Sm4sh won't be as balanced as Melee is now, assuming it gets no further patches.

...

Would Nintendo even let EVO have Melee as a main game without Smash 4? EVO actually gets permission to do the streams since companies can take it down otherwise.

...

It hasn't.

What makes Brawl so complex compared to Sm4sh? Could you explain?

It's reasons like that are why autism is still considered a buzzword.

I don't think they will. It also sucks how PM got killed off silently by Nintendo and Konami. It was the most fun I've had in ages. Casual enough to play with friends, complex enough to always feel like you have room for improvement, and iconic enough to get people to easily jump on. No one enjoys playing fighters around me unless it was PM and it sucks that it will never be finished.

It's crazy that tripping was a thing in the first place. Supposedly Sakurai added it in because he hated competitive players. Don't know why he's such a turbo casual when so he used to have hard modes in Kirby games.

This is the single quickest way to prove that you know absolutely nothing about Brawl to any person even slightly competitive in it. Tripping barely affects competitive play. It's a stupid mechanic, but it only happens on 1 out of every 100 dashes, and even nowadays when it can easily be removed by modding, most serious players don't care if it or isn't.

Just admit you know nothing about Smash other than buzzwords that you've heard.

Smash 64: Uuuh… well um… nobody talks about this one… hehe I remember playing it on my N64 it's cool with me I'm all about it bros (and if you were slightly more knowledgeable the buzzword would be "zero to death combos").

Melee: Autism! It's hard! You have to rape your controller just to do an attack! Wavedash to win! It's unbalanced! (Even though it's at least as balanced as Third Strike, Marvel 2, CvS2, Super Turbo, and every other respected classic fighting game.)

Brawl: LOL TRIPPING METAKNIGHT AMIRITE GUYS (Ice Climbers? Grab release combos? Duelist pro? What?)

Sm4sh: It's new and shiny and it's the only game I can win at (on For Glory) so it's the best. It's "comfy" (Holla Forums's favorite buzzword).

There, I saved everybody the trouble of bothering to read the rest of this thread.

If you really want to be educated on Smash, go to Smashboards or Discord. Don't parrot buzzwords from random Holla Forums anons who know nothing.

If brawl was melee 2.0, people would've left melee for brawl. the thing is that there have been about 2 games since melee in the smash series, brawl was trash and sm4sh doesn't have the technical skill melee does.

Your last statement is objectively wrong.
Tripping, same defensive meta. stalling for time. Metaknight. lots of retarded shit in brawl that are not ok. I enjoyed chain grabbing but that shit is better off not in smash.

Melee has actually devolved to Fox vs Fox. both boring and meh to watch. without hungrybox melee would slowly crumble, along with other non-fox players.

Smash 4 is still evolving with more things like smash 4 metaknight being not shit, mewtwo becoming top 5, among players always shedding light in what characters can do.

Meleefags like to watch the game, but they don't play it. The long hitstuns are fun to combo but hardly balanced. even if you just throw more stocks into it, melee is broken into Fox,shiek,marth and the lesser played falco, pikachu and jigglypuff. Smash 4 has a bigger, wider cast.

Smash 4 is better for both casuals and autistic tourneyfags. The problem is casual watchers want "le epic combos xD man super fast paced" and they autistically triggered that smash has a more defensive meta.

It survives and thrives because Melee is actually good, and its successors are shit.
So even if the competitive Smash community is cancer, it will live on and even continue to attract new players.
I've never been to a Smash local or tournament, but after Sm4sh turned out to be too slow and shitty for my tastes, I turned to Melee and 20XX 4.05. The AI in 20XX is amazing, and it has me playing Melee regularly despite nobody around to play against here in the middle of nowhere.

A few things off the top of my head:

1. SDI is nerfed to shit in Sm4sh, compared to Brawl which has a very high SDI multiplier allowing for complex SDI chasing.

2. Recoveries are overpowered in Brawl, but still not as insane and mindless as they are in Sm4sh.

3. ssbwiki.com/Category:Techniques_(SSBB) - A lot of these were removed from Sm4sh.

4. Pretty much every character lost options in their moveset from Brawl to Sm4sh.

Don't get me wrong. Brawl is a shit game competitively. But it's still not as bad as Rock Paper Smash AKA Tr4sh.

Brawl had a lot of jank in it, was slow, but had a lot of advanced techs and depth to it.

sm4sh removes the jank and makes it faster, but removed a lot of the advanced techs and some of the depth.

but while Brawl may have more depth. it's boring to watch most the time

Smash 64 is fun. It's simple and fun. but thats about it. There's no high skillcap or meta here. The puddle is shallow and combos are easy.

Melee is imbalanced. Clone-ridden and no beta testing allows an accident of a game that autists love for the combos that you can do. only 6 characters are viable in competitive play. Wavedashing is not fun to input, hence people yelling autistic. Also Marvel 2 is an imbalanced mess and I find it funny you say "marvel 2 was imbalanced therefore its ok"

Brawl had tripping and crazy tiers, but even with Metaknight it had a wide cast of viable tournament play characters. the second issue after tripping was chain grabbing. Brawl was fine, but why play brawl when smash 4 is just an evolution of it.

Smash 4 is polished, balanced tiers, casual and tourney friendly. The reason for criticism is its defensive meta. shield stun added to the game helped make people abuse shield less, but its still very defensive with emphasis on neutral game. Still really fun and ten times more balanced than melee. Meleefags simply can't play anything more slow paced and appreciate it for what it is. both games are fun. their differences should be cherishes. trying to make everything melee is no different than liberals and diversity

It's easy to say that autism is the reason, but if you go to a local Melee tournament the majority of the people there are just normal dudes. Sm4sh tournaments are another story. You see, my college has a "Smash Bros." club that runs Melee, PM, and Sm4sh tournaments on different days of the week. I've only been to one Sm4sh tournament and holy hell, I never want to go back. Each and every person there is an insufferable weeb. I don't mean the "low-key weebs" that watch anime but don't feel the need to broadcast it to the whole world, I mean the guys that have T-shirts of their waifus and bought all the amiibos. Most of them are also insufferable memesters. One guy I played said "feelsbadman" after EVERY. STOCK. I overheard people talking about how they were going to buy the Switch guaranteed the day after it was announced. They have a trophy and championship belt (Officially purchased from Nintendo™ of course) that they give to the winner and take a picture of him every week.
The PM kids are alright, though one of the better players has started calling himself "she" lately and wearing makeup. He's had incidents with emotional outbursts in the past whipped one of those $70 keyboard controllers at the ground after losing winners finals in a free college weekly
Pics in case you didn't believe me about the Sm4shfags

It has become Fox vs. Fox BECAUSE OF HBOX.
Without HBox, half the top players wouldn't have to keep their Foxes warmed up to play as a counterpick against Puff, and you'd see half of those Foxes playing other character instead.

Sage for double posting

that was incredibly boring to watch

This is why he won this year. Maybe 2 years ago but Fox is not really a true counterpick.

One issue i have with Sm4sh is that because it's nothing more than a bunch of mini reads, it'll get to a point where there won't be a dominant player because of the lack of tech. It took my friend about 4 months to reach the level of play I got to in around 8 months of casual play.

There are worse. I saw a kirby timeout a Wolf. It got to a point where the kirby edge hogged and wolf couldn't approach because getting sucked in by kirby would lead to his death.

Any match with snake is just boring too.

Fall speed ≠ weight. Samus is one of the floatier characters in the game (meaning low fall speed) but has extremely high weight, meaning she'll live a CC'd fox upsmash at 120% on battlefield while Falco will die, despite falling faster. Fox is an objectively better character than the rest of the roster, but the two best players (Armada then Hbox) are floaty mains, with Armada having Fox solely for Puff. In terms of the Fox-Puff matchup, Hbox is the only Puff main to even make it look winnable in CY+1. The next best Puff is Prince Abu, who's not even top 25.

Here's another game for instance. The previous one i posted was boring, sure but looking at this, could you blame ROB for defensive play? Losing a stock cause you got grabbed once isn't fun at all.

Non-Fox players… you mean the majority of the MioM top 100 who are not solo Fox mains (and often not Fox mains at all)? Character diversity is actually increasing in Melee, not the opposite, and it isn't even a universal consensus among top players that Fox is the best character.

EVO 2015's top 32 was only 33% Fox: meleeitonme.com/evo-2015-top-32-stats/

That's a lot of Fox, but hardly Fox vs. Fox only, and not even majority Fox. Furthermore, Fox by himself, with his wide variety of tools (shine alone can be used in 50 different ways), is still more interesting than every Tr4sh character combined.

If that's true, then why does Melee get more entrants than Sm4sh at every Smash-specific tournament? If anything, the opposite is true: Tr4sh fans prefer watching to playing. Furthermore, if you're talking about playing the game as opposed to merely watching it, then why are you judging Melee on balance that only applies at the highest level of play? At the level of play that most players are at, pretty much any character is viable.

Also, according to a recent reddit survey, Falco is the most played character: reddit.com/r/smashbros/comments/5gvd22/rsmashbros_melee_survey_results

He's incredibly popular, which you'd know if you knew anything about Melee other than what you glean from occasionally watching a grand finals match on YouTube (yes you've been caught faggot). Pikachu isn't even a part of the top 8, so it also makes no sense that you'd mention him before the Ice Climbers, Captain Falcon, and Peach, other than that Axe does well so you know him from that.

Yes, you're right. Saying that Sm4sh is just as good as Melee is just like saying that nigger culture is just as valid as aryan culture.

Correction: it has a 1% chance to happen on each dash.
You have no idea how many times I've seen the computer spawn a Starman directly on top of itself when it was losing. If Brawl's RNG is even half as malicious as Melee's, that "1% chance" would never happen for it, and would happen multiple times every single match for me.

Can't we just say both Melee and Sm4sh have their own merits and metas and just enjoy them how they are instead of devolving into autism wars over "YOUR GAMEFU A SHIT" every time a thread like this pops up?

No game will ever be like Melee (because it was an accident that somehow went right because of weird shenanigans), but we can still enjoy Sm4sh as well for how it is as well. As long as you're having >fun and not getting into an epeen war with people over these sort of things, that's all that matters, right?

Maybe, but it's more fun to argue.

Nice egalitarian fallacy faggot

HOLY FUCK, CHECK'D

Na. Smash was never hard to pick up for casuals. So why even remove mechanics that give it depth? Instead on building on what works and tweaking what doesn't. They removed what made it fun for people like me. I played Sm4sh for about 15 hours and don't feel the urge to ever play it again. It's just boring. But I had no problem playing Melee or PM for years. I even played Brawl longer but that had much more content outside the combat. Speaking of which, Sm4sh fucked up by having Smash Run only on the 3DS with barely any options to tweak it, no online play, or the ability to see and fuck with other players. Not being able to buy custom moves with coins was stupid too.

LEAVE

Hey newpal! :^)

I read once that Nintendo likes to make their sequels different, so that they don't end up rehashing the same stuff that people could get from the old game. It sounds weird coming from Nintendo of all companies but it kinda makes sense for Smash Bros. All 4 games have their own metas with their own mechanics, and end up fun for different reasons. I wouldn't want to see them cave in and make the eventual 5mash a Melee clone, because you might as well just play Melee.
That said, they could have made Sm4sh much more intricate. Ledgetrumping is neat, and being able to grab ledges behind you is a huge help, but aside from that they didn't do much with the game. If they smoothed out the movement a bit and kept momentum at least, the game would be much more fun. They could even change things up, and replace the airdodge with something less annoying. Even outside competitive they could have kept Melee's adventure mode at least.
The worst thing about Sm4sh is that it has so much potential already in the game but it's caked in layers of bullshit. All they'd have to do is:
And the game would be just fine. If you want something closer to Melee you'd just enable Smooth Lander, which is an equipment effect. Custom moves would evolve the meta in ways we haven't seen before in a Smash game. We'd have more variety when playing Battlefield-like maps. It would be it's own distinct thing, and it would be interesting.

Lurk moar you fucking newfag scum.

There is a fucking Smash thread on the catalogue already, OP, Jesus. >>1142579

As far as Melee surviving, there are a number of contributing factors:

Melee is fucking broken. I don't know how versed you are in frame data and the like, but some of the stuff Fox and Falco can do is beyond broken by any metric. In the same way Marvel 2 and Brood War were busted pieces of trash due to dozens of mechanics converging, Melee has a bunch of movement mechanics and subtle glitches which combine with the free-form attack system and lots of hitstun to create a combo playground. Due to the way damage and knockback scaling work, as well as directional influence (DI), people come up with new combos frequently. In spite of that, there is a lot of guaranteed stuff which gives the game a solid core to work around.

Melee players love Melee a lot more than most FGC players love their games. I don't mean that as an insult, just a simple truth derived from the hardship of playing the game and organizing tournaments (woo, CRTs!). Nintendo hated Melee players even as far back as the MLG days, tournaments never paid out well until the esports era, and the game was honestly never meant to be pushed to the lengths people have. Watch The Smash Brothers Documentary if you want to know more about the grassroots nature of the Melee scene, like the first ever tournament series being hosted in a guy's house with tents in the backyard - a lot of the top players now were teenagers during the game's early years. It's very long, but a very good video series.

Brawl, plain and simple, was a slap in the face of everything remotely competitive about Melee and Smash Bros. The game was intentionally designed to erase competitive elements from the series, to the point of including tripping, hardcoded random input delays, an altogether too lenient input buffer, no ground momentum (in a PLATFORMER, WHAT), and staggeringly good shields & dodges. See pic 1 for more info on how the single player got worse.

Melee is such a weird and busted game that people are discovering new shit for it even now, and it's never truly been patched. Last year, a completely new mechanic called V-cancelling was discovered. It's mostly useless in any situation, but it's in there. Due to the low priority of many animations as well, and the freeform physics engine, many recovery and hitstun animations can be cancelled by falling off a platform or the edge of the stage. This can lead to some serious shit; I can post some videos if you want.

Arguably more importantly, no other fighting game scratches the same itch Melee does. Brawl is inherently uncompetitive, Tr4sh is slow and tech is so fucked up you need near-frame-perfect inputs just to move left and right with any semblance of control over your character, and any other fighting game uses digital inputs which feel clunky and stiff no matter how many movement options you have. Melee gives you more control over your character than any game I've ever seen, and due to the damage system and many moves' multiple hitboxes, each attack has at least three uses.

HOLY SHIT SUPE RMARIO IS FIGHTING MEWTWO ON THE GREAT FOX THIS SI THE BEST GAME EVER
OH MY FUCKING GOD NESS IS THROWING SAMUS ARAN OFF THE NOSE OF THE BLUE FALCON THIS IS THE BEST GAME EVER
YOU CAN SEE UP PRINCESS PEACH'S DRESS????!!!!?!?!?!?!
KIRBY HAS DIFFERENT HATS FOR EVERY CHARACTER, JESUS CHRIST THIS IS THE BEST GAME EVER
wait, who's the ice climbers?
Plus trophies, plus adventure mode, plus classic mode, plus event matches, plus special melee, plus items, plus wacky stages, plus target test & home run contest, plus tonnes of characters who had their personalities defined through Smash like Captain Falcon and Bowser.

No super meters, no EX bars, no BURST gauge, no Roman cancels, no assist characters, no life bars, no round counters, no gems. Just two characters, four lives, and eight minutes. Almost anyone can understand what's going on in Smash Bros. just by looking at the screen.

If there's money to be had playing something, people will play it. The resurgence of interest in Melee following the 2013 EVO Spirit Bomb and the 2014 Documentary (which I mentioned earlier) grabbed the attention of many investors. Given how little money is required for playing Melee, many sposors have found it to be a profitable venture backed up by a welcoming and overall positive community, autistocrats aside. Hell, ESPN esports reports on Melee more often than it does on real fighting games like Guilty Gear or Marvel 3.

and don't get me started on the memes

Lurk more, newfag.

I'd like Tr4sh a lot more if it just had real edge cancels and if running momentum carried over from your jumps. Ledge trumping is cute, but I prefer real edgeguards to yet another series of micro reads.

because melee is no-joke the perfect video game.
Even fucking retarded normalfags I know who usually just skateboard and smoke the peaceful herb got massively immersed in smash.
Even to the point where after they'd mastered playing it on the most shallow level they started fucking around with the mechanics and got really good at it altnough one does exclusively play as fox and falco and abuse shorthops and shines like a fucking nigger
It's shallow enough for retard normalfags to play, deep enough for seasons fighting game players to enjoy, and is full of characters that fucking everyone knows and enjoy.

Extreme Autism

O wish Smash Bros didn't exist, it's nothing but cancer now.

trips of unfortunate truth

It's shitposting bait. You guys shouldn't have replied in the first place.

Less characters is GOOD for fighting games. See: UNIEL, the bestfighter ever made.

It doesn't matter if it was shitposting or legitimate newfaggotry, either way he needs to leave

What about Skullgirls

I think legit one of the main reasons everyone got attached to Sm4sh back then was because some people got tired of only about 8-10 characters being viable period in Melee and went nuts at the idea of having tons of variety and choices now for whatever character you wanted to play as.

Also, because it has Mega Man and Pac-Man in it. And if it weren't for that, we wouldn't get the glory and pure jank in human form that is Abadango. Although whether he or Abate is the true king of jank and RNGesus, no one knows.

Yes, when Sm4sh came out, one of the things I liked about it was that I feel I could pick anyone on the roster and have a decent time with them. I ended up playing as a lot of characters in Sm4sh, I didn't even really have a main as I did a handful.

But then the DLC characters came out and I stopped having fun, so I stopped playing.

Touch of death is stupid and combos are way too long. UNIEL is the perfect blend of Street Fighter style footsies and anime airdash blockstrings/combos. Im not even memeing, I think its the best one out there.

Only 1 character can actually air dash in UNIEL from what I remember. But it's really nice that it rewards the player who can block really will with a ton of GRD. Especially if you know when to shield. Playing defensively can give you Vorpal which gives you the option to make an risky attack safe, extend combos, gain meter, or invincibility frames.

I think Koihime Enbu is more inclined to SF footsies since UNIEL has absurd hitboxes with many characters to the point where new players will have a hard time telling when or where they're even safe.

It tried to be MvC lite + Guilty Gear, and it failed at both.

I think 4 is so much better than Melee I can't understand why people still play Melee

BUT BRAWL WAS SHIT

I just like it and keep playing because it's still fun to play - even with it's flaws (and it is flawed), there's no real reason why I'd play the other games beyond the novelty factor. I'm sure most people thought that way too when Brawl came out, both when the scene was on the brink and especially after the disappointment set it some time after launch. I actually kind of admire the whole community in a weird way - they actually stuck with something they liked rather than just moved onto the next big thing. And as romanticized as it sounds, they built themselves up off of passion (and autism) for their games. In a way it reminds me of the early FGC, only built up from people's dingy basements rather from dingy arcades.

Of course this is easy to say when the company that owns the game you play doesn't care about your scene. There's no monetary incentive to actually move games in Smash because Nintendo doesn't pump money into the scene, and any bonuses in visibility and publicity a new game would get you dies after the initial hype dies down. You'd never see this sort of thing happen within the FGC (with SF fans in particular) now that the likes of Capcom have their hands all over it. Even when people had a similar dislike for SF4 (remember Sleep Fighter 4 days?) compared to Brawl, the FGC wouldn't stick with 3S because all their top-players had moved over and their primary event runners were paid by Capcom in advance. Same thing happened with the change to V - plenty of people, including top players, criticized the game yet we still have SFV on ESPN2 on July 17th.

Maybe if SF fans had that same passion and autism we might have seen people playing 3S on CRTs at the Mandalay Bay Event Center. Or maybe if Nintendo had been paying for Smash at EVO since 2007 Melee would have truly died. At this point though Melee has become so ingrained as the core of the Smash community that you couldn't pay (most of) the players enough to switch over. And with the rumored Melee port on Switch VC, it's probably not going to die any time soon.

the mechanics allow for almost free movement, dispite the top tiers being consistant the meta of lower tiers are always changing and suprising people making some hype moments. the community is great when you are finally ingrained into it.

it lasted for a long time because its a good game.

It limits you alot more making the game less fun. its like moving from thirdstrike to sf5

Melee has a unique itch to it that other games can not scratch and it has a dedicated community for it.

That is your answer.

one of the best things to happen in the past few years was amsaa red yoshi destroying m2k.

1. Characters are nintendo characters
2. Nintendo fanbase is comprised of kids and autistic people so the appeal of "LE PIKACHU BEATS UP MARIO SO FUNNY" is too great.
3. The fanbase also is comprised of rich kids

That's it. The autism power is too great, it's amazing how dedicated they are to that shit. Hauling CTRs everywhere and never getting tired of watching the same fox vs fox match over and over again.

It's a game that rewards creativity and technical prowess. The more time you put into it, the more exhilarating it becomes. You can play the game for years and still find new things to do and new techniques to get the edge over your opponent. So what if many characters are clones when each one feels unique and you're blind if you say Falco is no different from Fox. It's pretty much the best sequel the original 64 game could have asked for, taking what already worked and making it faster and more complex.

Then along comes Brawl and all that shit gets taken away because the old-fuck that was kind of incharge of the first two games (Hal Labs deserves more credit) doesn't like the idea that a newbie can't go toe to toe with somebody who has been playing the game for years. The irony here is that Brawl went on to have just as big a competitive scene as Melee (despite not lasting nearly as long) and had it's own share of exploits that players used to get wins. As a party game, yes Brawl is fun in a braindead kind of way (as they all are) but by putting so many limits on what the player can do, it's no wonder why so many were put off and why many abandoned it after 4 was released.

Sakurai thought he could please both audiences with Smash 4, since now you can kind of perform combos I guess but the low hitstun, lack of l-cancelling and clunky movement still limits the player on what they can do. I compare it to lego, with 64 and Melee being a big box of random pieces where you can build whatever you want, while Brawl and Smash 4 are those small movie-tie-in box sets where you can only build what the instructions tell you to. And it's this reason why I've never understood the quantity over quality argument that so many Smash 4 fans use to discredit Melee.

Where did this meme even come from? The only real clones I can think of are FalconDorf, Dr. Mario, Roy, and Pichu.

This is me tbh lad

I didn't know Ricky Ortiz plays PM
Seriously though fuck those sodomites

It hasn't thrived. It was the documentary + evo in 2013 that 'saved ' it, before that it had worse numbers than brawl. And it has great design, recoginizable characters, and a unique and intuitive playstyle that never gets old. People still come up with different combos and techniques today.

Because Tr4sh is so fucking boring to watch.

You're forgetting Young Link and Falco, though Falco's a bit less egregious of a clone than most of the rest. By technicality Luigi's a clone as well, though he's grandfathered in from 64, so barring Luigi that's 6 clones in a 26-character game. Not really too terrible but with how samey the clones generally are and how unique the characters that're clones really should be (why the fuck does Ganondorf fight like Captain Falcon when he's a swordsman and warlock for instance) they stuck in everybody's head.

While it did die down from 2007-2009, it was growing fairly steadily since 2010, while Brawl pretty much plateaued between 2010-2012 and only fell since then.

"Technically" Puff is also a clone of Kirby, or at least semi-clone - since 64 their normals have been very similar with only their specials being completely different from each other. One could say that 64 had 2 clones out of a 12-character roster.