Smash 4 is in a great place at the moment. The meta is evolving, being a hell of a lot faster and technical compared to this time last year, and competition is getting tighter and tighter at the top level. The reign of ZeRo has potentially come to an end, with top 8s not being a foregone conclusion anymore, providing some actual excitement during big tournaments. The current inconsistency at the high level of Smash 4, due in part to the volatile nature of the 2-stock format, does guarantee that upsets and crazy sets will be fairly common. One only needs to look at APEX 2016 and Low Tier City 4 this past weekend; there was at least one moment per tournament which caused a massive Tweet storm. There are the seeds of some great storylines being sown this summer and I’m pretty sure following CEO, Evo and Super Smash Con, Smash 4 is going to have an even brighter future.
However, for all the potential growth that Smash 4 has to offer, many are trying to rush along its expansion. There is this expectation that Smash 4 needs to have its Gods, its embittered rivalries and grand storylines right now. This is not so subtly saying that Smash 4 has to have the legacy that Melee has, even though the game has only been around for 2 years and we’re not even close to establishing a proper hierarchy of players. This is not for lack of trying however, as seen with the recent Panda Global rankings which may quickly become obsolete by the end of this year. Those in the Smash 4 scene believe the game needs to have it all and it needs to have it now, which I believe is detrimental to the establishment of a lasting history for the game.
Smash 4 itself already has a legacy to some extent; many of the top players we see like ANTi, ZeRo, Nairo and so forth, they cut their teeth on Brawl. Rivalries and stories already exist for some players but due to the dual factors of Brawl being a bit of a damp squib competitively for many and that a fair section of Smash 4’s current audience being brand new to this game, much of that legacy and history is either lost or simply not known by a large amount of the community. There are attempts to rectify this, with False’s recent crowdfunding campaign to make a Brawl documentary in the same vein as Samox’s celebrated Melee documentary, but much of Smash 4’s player and spectator base see Smash 4 as a fresh game with a clean slate for new storylines to emerge and grow.
With Melee going from strength to strength, even though it has had its own problems of legitimacy as we saw in the case of Leffen’s visa, there is an impetus on Smash 4 to keep up the pace. As Melee fans recount and weave these grand stories of, say, Mango versus Armada at Genesis or the tale of Leffen the Godslayer, there is an obvious desire for Smash 4 to have the same. As such, we’ve seen claims of Smash 4 having “Godslayers instead of Gods,” or that the “Gods of Smash 4 are starting to reveal themselves” and most recently, the Twitter ‘beef’ between ZeRo and Ally which has resulted in a Marvel-esque Civil War erupting over social media.
Let’s first interrogate the term “God,” as it’s so bound up with this almost mythic history of Smash that using such a label brings with it a whole host of preconceptions. Within the context of Smash 4, only 1 player is really allowed to hold the label–that’s ZeRo–but even then, ZeRo’s dominance of the game is more similar to that of Ken during the early years of Melee, so the term “King of Smash 4” may be more appropriate. Even if people choose to call ZeRo a God, there then comes the issue of Godslayers, which seems to be the label for anyone that has taken a set off ZeRo, regardless of whether it was in his prime before his finger injury and temporary hiatus or after. While that pool of people is small, the majority of “Godslayers” never went on to total victory after besting ZeRo in the winners’ bracket. If you’re really being pedantic, there is only one person that really should hold the title of “Godslayer” and that is Nairo, for actually taking a tournament over ZeRo in his prime, rather than in his current post-finger injury state and even then, a single victory does not a title make. There is a growing pool of “Godslayers,” with Larry Lurr, Ally and ANTi joining the club but then, the title ceases to really mean anything if come post Super Smash Con, we’ve got 7 or so Godslayers running about.
Now, let’s move onto this recent ‘Civil War’ which has developed in the past week. You may go, “Great, this is exactly what Smash 4 needs to keep growing by providing some big plot point within the current saga,” but there is something inauthentic about this spat between ZeRo and Ally. It seems engineered to be an event, rather than being birthed from a genuine animosity between two players. Take something like the ongoing feud between Leffen and Westballz; that is a rivalry birthed from constant play between the two in tournament, along with a proper dislike for each other as seen by their snipes on Twitter. You can feel the venom behind each Tweet and one need only look at the now legendary sets between the two at BEAST 6 to see this feud made manifest. For fans watching these sets, this long-running fight heightens the drama and only enriches the storyline but more importantly, it has come about organically.
For Smash 4, this ‘Civil War’ feels manufactured from its very inception. What started as an innocuous tweet for Larry Lurr soon snowballed into some playground level trash talk, complete with several popularity contest Twitter polls and photoshops with Ally and ZeRo’s faces put on Iron Man and Captain America. When the hashtags for each team came out, the whole business became a marketing push rather than a feud which will spark off something greater. There is a tournament coming out of this and some have been swept up in the whole thing but it smacks of manufactured hype, rather than excitement born from a long series of close sets or a building tension between two players. Sure, Ally does now have two tournaments up on ZeRo but that doesn’t mean it’s time to stage a whole tournament around something which has only just begun. That would be like staging Battle of the Five Gods after every God had won a single tournament. However, Ally has even said that he only engaged in this Twitter battle as the Smash 4 scene is “incredibly boring,” presumably lacking the feuds which keep the Melee scene so exciting. Playing the bad guy is all well and good but it seems if no one can handle the fighting words, these storylines are destined to take ages to mount and manufacturing these feuds may be the only way forward to aid the community’s continued expansion.
True hype takes ages to build; it’s a seed planted after a close set which then takes several tournaments to grow into a proper storyline that grips audiences. The coming summer will see many of these take root but you can’t rush the hype before it is ready. The shakeup of results and the catching up of many of the other top players is the signal that we’re only just getting started on the long road. Imagine Smash 4 as one of those giant land grab races you’d see in the 1800s, where hundreds of people would line up to stake their claims on a piece of land out West. Rather than setting up a ranch or panning for gold, these outriders are planting the seeds of legacy, those stories and feuds which will be remembered for years to come. While there had previously been a front runner for the first third, everyone is starting to catch up and the race is starting to really become interesting, yet we as spectators are already trying to rush to the home stretch. Smash 4 is already growing at an accelerated rate, breaking records for entrant numbers at both CEO and Evo so there is no danger of sudden stagnation. Let Smash 4 players forge their own path into history with genuine sagas, instead of trying to write its destiny before we even know who the big players will be.
Sources: Mew2King, ThePricklySausage, Kickstarter, BearUNLV, Larry Lurr, NLytes, Ally
