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The Smash Brothers - A Documentary About Melee


Ethan Rex
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Have any of you guys seen this yet? It's a 9-part YouTube Documentary about the competitive Melee scene, focusing on 8 or so top-tier Melee players like Ken, Azen, PC Chris, etc.

If you've played Melee at all I'd highly recommend it - it's pretty well made and wonderfully entertaining.

Any thoughts?

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i just sent this to my friend. him and i have played smash bros melee for over 10 years and were going to join a competition recently, but sadly missed it! we used to live together for 2.5 years but i recently moved, and now i no longer have a gamecube so i havent played in about 6 months but we considered ourselves to be.... semi-pro players I guess, since we played about 30 - 60 minutes every single day for those 2.5 years, and then the 7.5 years before that. Anytime we heard of new competitors in our city, we got so excited because we thought we'd finally found some other people who were at our level, but as it always turned out, we just mopped the floor with them :P

This is such a brilliant game and I wish more people played it!

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i liked the documentary overall. lots of great footage from the early days of the scene, and the narrative they put together is pretty compelling. it's unfortunate that it's so U.S.-centric, sidelining Armada almost entirely, but i suppose that's to be expected. also that random segment defending the smash community's insistence that their brand of misogyny and homophobia is just super cute was off-putting.

but it seems like the documentary has had the effect of breathing some life into smaller local scenes which is great !

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I watched this about a month ago. After the first episode I was just compelled to see the rest, it's pretty interesting and entertaining. I didn't play Melee much but I used to play a lot of Street Fighter IV and watched some tournaments. I didn't really know anything about Melee as a tournament fighter even though I was aware of it, so this pretty much kept me up to speed - it's well made. If you're interested in competitive fighting I recommend watching it.

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i liked the documentary overall. lots of great footage from the early days of the scene, and the narrative they put together is pretty compelling. it's unfortunate that it's so U.S.-centric, sidelining Armada almost entirely, but i suppose that's to be expected. also that random segment defending the smash community's insistence that their brand of misogyny and homophobia is just super cute was off-putting.

but it seems like the documentary has had the effect of breathing some life into smaller local scenes which is great !

honestly armada has been to like what, 5 US tournaments? what is his backstory? he's really good and came from overseas. like, that's it. he's a nice guy and obviously very good but there's no real story to tell there.

and i would hardly call that a defense. more like a 'we know it sucks but, we do it still. sorry bout that'

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honestly armada has been to like what, 5 US tournaments? what is his backstory? he's really good and came from overseas. like, that's it. he's a nice guy and obviously very good but there's no real story to tell there.

thats what im saying, it kind of denies the existence of the swedish/european scene entirely. yeah his US record alone might seem sparse, but im pretty sure to this day he has not dropped a set in europe in like 5 years. that seems noteworthy to me, that somebody basically owned an entire continent for the better part of their career, not to mention singlehandedly redefining peach as a character.

but i understand that it's a lot to ask of an independent fan documentary to travel to europe and do all the work and research to tell that side of the story, so i dont really blame them. same goes for the scenes in japan, etc.

and i would hardly call that a defense. more like a 'we know it sucks but, we do it still. sorry bout that'

as i recall it ended with wes saying "people choose to be offended, so really it's their problem not ours." thats a pretty clear statement to me. the whole thing seemed very "who me?" tongue-in-cheek. as opposed to players like scar who seem to be making an effort to promote inclusiveness in the scene.

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as i recall it ended with wes saying "people choose to be offended, so really it's their problem not ours." thats a pretty clear statement to me. the whole thing seemed very "who me?" tongue-in-cheek. as opposed to players like scar who seem to be making an effort to promote inclusiveness in the scene.

I felt like the filmmakers realized part of the way in that people might not like the language they used so they tried to fit something in as a sort of disclaimer. Unfortunately by nature of that it seemed a little insincere.

i just sent this to my friend. him and i have played smash bros melee for over 10 years and were going to join a competition recently, but sadly missed it! we used to live together for 2.5 years but i recently moved, and now i no longer have a gamecube so i havent played in about 6 months but we considered ourselves to be.... semi-pro players I guess, since we played about 30 - 60 minutes every single day for those 2.5 years, and then the 7.5 years before that. Anytime we heard of new competitors in our city, we got so excited because we thought we'd finally found some other people who were at our level, but as it always turned out, we just mopped the floor with them :P

This is such a brilliant game and I wish more people played it!

Agreed on that last sentiment man - I watched it with some smash buddies of mine who have never really played competitively and it sort of opened up that whole world to us. Too bad Oklahoma doesn't have that big of a smash scene as far as I know...

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thats what im saying, it kind of denies the existence of the swedish/european scene entirely. yeah his US record alone might seem sparse, but im pretty sure to this day he has not dropped a set in europe in like 5 years. that seems noteworthy to me, that somebody basically owned an entire continent for the better part of their career, not to mention singlehandedly redefining peach as a character.

but i understand that it's a lot to ask of an independent fan documentary to travel to europe and do all the work and research to tell that side of the story, so i dont really blame them. same goes for the scenes in japan, etc.

as i recall it ended with wes saying "people choose to be offended, so really it's their problem not ours." thats a pretty clear statement to me. the whole thing seemed very "who me?" tongue-in-cheek. as opposed to players like scar who seem to be making an effort to promote inclusiveness in the scene.

I may be misremembering this from the live stream they did when this first came out, but I'm pretty sure he wanted to do more on Armada but didn't get enough interview time to cover it properly.

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Wow this is really entertaining. Can't stop watching. Really well made stuff here, I'm glad you linked it.

I remember I was one of those players who thought they were pretty baller. But I got my face kicked in at college lol and I realized I was utter trash haha.

Edited by kitty
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watched whole thing tonight

incredible.

Melee is one of the first games I remember being released and being a huge deal (yes, I am a young one), and so while it's not my favorite game in the world, it has a place in my gamer heart just because of how much I played and sucked at it when I was a wittle kid haha

It's truly a great game. absolutely outstanding game. so to see a really impressive documentary entirely around this game is just glorious.

loved it.

edit: following Ken on twitch now. still a beast. just watched him play with Hugs and somebody else

Edited by Garrett Williamson
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  • 2 weeks later...

This doc was the final step to push myself to get back into melee... I went to amazon and bought a gamecube for $20 and now have a small setup at work for when I stay late.

Also, just want to say that since this is bringing a lot of people back to melee, you can melee melee online with other people on your PC! You can find the info here:

http://smashboards.com/threads/dolphin-online-melee-netplay.335432/

It's pretty crazy that they've been able to do that... I played with someone from a couple hundred miles away almost like they were sitting next to me - it's crazy!

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