The Origins of a Fight: Battle Royale vs Super Smash

by Nathan (Thane) Ware, originally posted to Gamasutra on June 7th, 2016

In the wake of Super Sm4sh's home run success some have stepped up to throw a couple more blows at the 2 year old punching bag Playstation All-Stars: Battle Royale. Yes, the clone Smash fans all love to hate. I own the game and have spent my fair share beating friends up as Sir Daniel, but even I will give the crown to Smash if there can only be one throne. But in all of the conversations about Royale since it was released, I have yet to see one side of the conversation explored and that's a deeper dive into the origins of these two games and how that influenced the final products. This is not just useful in understanding one fight between two franchises, but in understanding a whole genre.

Firstly, some caveats. I think the comparison of SSB4, a game design in its fourth iteration, and BR, a game in its first, is a fixed fight from the beginning. So on competitive grounds, SSB1 must be the franchise representative from Nintendo. It turns out it's a better game than Sony produced anyway, but my analysis is primarily going to be made on the ground of origins, and the origins of everything after SSB1 was simply, "Hey that first game did great, huh? How can we iterate on that?"

Another caveat is that I am not a competitively recognized fighting game player, and I really can't stand Street Fighter-esque fighting games. I have placed in some local competitions in Soul Calibur and SSBM and Toribash, but when it comes to places where technical mastery is a required perspective I rely on my friends and external sources for their input.

A good place to start is the specific discussion that inspired this piece. The couch-talk between IGN staff works as a very apt display of the main differences people level between Smash and Battle Royale, (link). Super Smash had a better reception in the variety of attacks, the penalty for falling off stage, the interactivity of stages, finishing move mechanics, physics, the character roster's relatability, and technicality. Commenters have had to point out similarities between the franchises and explain themselves because Battle Royale's director would have us believe that it is only surface level (link). In reality it is obvious that Smash was a template SuperBot Entertainment relied on when making difficult design decisions. To be distinctive, SuperBot attempted to eschew things they thought made Super Smash distinctive, but their decisions on which they thought the game could survive without were not guided by the same thought processes which guided the team at HAL Labs. In that way SuperBot was led to try to build a cohesive whole off misguided premises, the same mistake so many other Smash clones have made(link). They were overlooking the soul of the game they were making.

What was the soul of Super Smash? We can't mind-meld with the director, but we can look at the known aspects of the game's production (link)(link), and do a little speculation based on the final designs. At the tail end of the SNES, when Nintendo had already done some experimentation with its Super FX chip in Starfox and Yoshi's Island, Masahiro Sakurai decided the platform needed a fighting game. In conversations with Satoru Iwata it came out that the in-development N64 needed a four player game to take advantage of the thumbstick. The prototype Hal Labs eventually came up with, code-named Battle Royale (I think we know where Sony got their name…) and later called Kakuto-Geemu Ryuoh or Dragon-King: The Fighting Game, was quite similar to Super Smash, but the Nintendo mascots theme had yet to be established. How is it the gameplay Hal Labs came up with wound up fitting so well with Nintendo franchises when it wasn't outright designed for them?

Alpha footage of Dragon-King, the early form of Smash.

We can't know exactly how the developers made all their decisions, but working on a fighting game as a first-party developer for a company that had almost exclusively platformers leads to Super Smash being the answer to a kind of what-if quetion: "What if a bunch of platforming characters were to fight?" The design of Super Smash's remarkable gameplay extends directly from this what-if question.

We can find the core "what-if" question for every fighting game to reveal how it pervades the final designs of the most distinctive fighting games. Street Fighter(link) started as "What if a bunch of arcade brawler characters got in a fight?"; Toribash(link) started as "What if you could control every muscle individually in a fight?"; Soul Calibur started as "What if fantasy weapon masters got in a fight?"; Deadliest Warrior(link) and Bushido Blade(link) started as "What if real-world weapon masters got in a fight?"; and Dissidia Final Fantasy(link) started as “What if magical anime heroes and villains got in a fight?”

Sakurai's previous work was almost entirely in the platforming genre, (Kirby Dream Land anyone?) so he would have had an easy time directing the minutiae of 2D platforming physics and gameplay. The line between his origins and Super Smash's design decisions are quite direct. What are the obstacles in platformers? Enemy entities, environmental hazards, and pitfalls. So too in Smash does the battlefield fill with obstacle items and hazards, and the boundary of the screen is death, rather than a health bar. Are there deep, complex, combo systems in platformers? Not really. So too in Smash are the attacks distinct combinations of a button and 1 of 4 directions, depending on the character state. These buttons also closely match primary functions in a platformer. Compared to other fighting games at the time, Smash had way more air-time (and floaty physics) and a strange heath mechanic. But compared to platformers? Pretty much the same air time with a controllable descent, and lives are a perfectly normal health mechanic. But the pitfalls in particular are the most primary holdover from platforming. The fear of missing a platform is the greatest fear of a platformer. But there’s one mechanic which, on its face, doesn’t fit this mold. The percent damage mechanic seems to not really be represented in platformer tropes. But if we're still following "What if platformer characters fought," we can't just look at the platformer. We also have to look at the fight.

Real life duels would seem lightning fast to anyone who enjoys video game or action film fights. Directors of both games and films have wanted the fight to stretch on as long as the drama can sustain it, but real duelists wanted to kill their enemies and kill them fast. That lethality makes the conflict in media tense, but it takes some contrivance to keep duelists from simply cutting their opponent down immediately. In platforming games, that contrivance may be a power-up the player loses, or a health bar, but the one contrivance endemic to nearly all single-player games is the fact that your enemies are not as smart nor capable as you.

If smash were hewn closer to a Nintendo platformer, it would actually be about as quick as a real duel. Players would hit each other a couple times, then their lives would run out. The percentage mechanic cleverly draws the battle out longer, while ramping up the threat of the pitfall. The way it may have grown is that Sakurai wanted players to have a chance to recover from a fall when their opponent knocked them off, but then he also had to have a way for players to raise the stakes on each other and for games between skilled players to not stretch on for ages. When your primary fear is falling, and your primary escape from that fear is jumping and recovery moves, the most visceral stakes-raising is a way to knock players further away from the ledge every time. Therefore, a hit-strength multiplier in the form of damage.

Hold up, I’m gonna end this woman’s whole career.

So back to Battle Royale. Their design asks the question "What if playstation characters were in a super smash game?" and then forgets all of what makes super smash visceral and what makes the sony brand distinctive. Ignore balancing issues with the super-moves; ignore the boring campaign and intrusive stage interactivity; the problems with BR are in its developer's choice to blindly start with Smash's core mechanics. Playstation is not a company built on a history of side-scrolling platformers, but one of 3D platformers. Really, Royale should have followed in the prints left by Power Stone 1 & 2 (link)and utilized the 3D arena. But in starting with Smash’s template, SuperBot did their best to make Battle Royale stand out.

Battle Royale’s combo game is actually really robust.

In many ways, Battle Royale is a much more technical game than Smash 4. Characters have 3 sets of attack-types with dedicated buttons, meaning they don’t have to map to the Special/Tilt/Smash trichotomy of smash, and therefore can have more variety of combo-set-ups. High technicality actually makes sense for Battle Royale’s older demographic than Smash. Whether there was a SUPER meter or not, the flexibility of the moveset would have made sense for the variety of genres which Sony’s characters come from, and the extended combo-potential would have made the game stand out in comparison to Smash. It may actually be possible that these positive designs necessitated the SUPER meter. Extreme variety in movesets makes balancing much more difficult when relying on something as finnicky as a physics system to determine the winner. Additionally, long combos are harder to design when the exact distance an enemy will be knocked back is inconsistent. Whether it was these designs which SuperBot thought necessitated a SUPER meter, or it was the SUPER-moves which chosen early on as a top-down design requirement, in the end, much of the rest of the game molded to fit the new direction.

The Super-Move is the ONLY way to score/kill opponents. Its progress bar's build-up is the only relevant competition. One might think that, comparably, the only relevant competition in Smash is increasing your enemy's percentage, but that mechanic works in service of getting your opponent off your square of land, and the struggle is always squarely focused on out-of-bounds-ing your opponent. Where Super Smash is essentially king of the hill, Battle Royale is essentially king of the progress bar. I have to emphasize how out of place this super-move system is.

Every attack builds the SUPER meter, and knocking players off the edge releases a portion of their meter onto the stage as pickups for the remaining players. The SUPER meter led to these additional mechanics to justify having both low-knockback attacks and high-knockback attacks, and to justify having pitfalls. Consider that idea. In a platform-fighter, one has to put mechanics in to justify pitfalls.

All BR's move variety and technicality of combos means nothing if the set up to that powerful punch doesn't get your opponent any closer to dying. The pitfalls still exist, but instead of it being the main death mechanic, the penalty is only a slight loss of your meter and a slight boost in your opponents. The penalty is so slight that prioritizing king of the hill tactics will actually lose you the game. The optimal strategy is to trap your opponent in low-knockback combo-strings until you fill up your bar quickly and kill them immediately. The other best regular moves in Royale are Pa-Rappa's boom-box and Fat Princess's nap, both of which forgo fighting to increase the player's power bar steadily and do nothing to force pitfalls. I repeat: the best moves in a fighting game are are low-knockback or pacifistic, and the platformer's worst fear is turned into a pittance.

It all comes back to the player experience in the end, and the pursuit of dramatic gameplay. Part of the joy of playform-fighters is how getting close to blast zone heightens the moment-to-moment intensity, and surviving a heavy hit not only relieves you, but also heightens the intensity ever further because you know the next hit could send you that little bit further. Because pitfalls aren’t a threat in Battle Royale, the drama is much closer to that of a street-fighter-esque fighter. While I haven’t written here much about those types of fighters, what I will say is their drama model is a more intimate, deliberate form of combat. I don’t think I have to go too much into the fact that the floaty physics and explosive knockback of platform fighters do not make the best medium for intimate deliberate combat.

I was excited for Sony. Their characters are honestly just as memorable as Nintendo's, and one can see in the wide variety of character specific mechanics in Royale the team was willing to experiment on the path to solving their what-if question. If only they had started from the heart of their history, rather than trying to ride on the coat-tails of the reigning champion, Playstation could have been an innovator. They could have been a contender. Instead, they were left punching at shadows.