well fuck nintendo

[TooB]

actually the only fighter that i've ever gotten into is smash, so i'm pretty damn biased, but i've tried to get into others without prevail
and i'm actually interested in other fighters since there is obvious an appeal for a lot of people

but idk the analogy that i like a lot is that melee (or smash in general i guess) is like the Jazz when normal fighters are more like Classical music. Other fighters have pre-made combos and even though there is more to it than just combos, they're a huge part of it. most combos that you see in smash are improvised. they depend on reads, percentage, and directional influence from the person being comboed. i'm not saying that traditional fighters don't take any less skill to be good at than smash, i just think that the combo system that goes into melee is fucking amazing and i cant imagine a better one

also, every element about competitive melee that isn't present in normal fighters is such a great mechanic imo. the edge play is fucking awesome. rewarding high risk maneuvers like going off stage for an edge guard is a great system. or you can play it safe and give them a better chance of recovering
also, platforms are awesome and add to the improvisational nature of the game

and something that rarely gets brought up is how amazing competitive 2v2 is in melee (team attack on, of course). team-based (improvisational) combos, having to watch out for 3 people (including your team mate, lol), and the crazy increase in mindgames is something that is pretty unique to smash imo

but honestly i would be really interested to hear why people prefer traditional fighters because i'm pretty biased

EDIT: also, i would argue that melee/P:M has much more character diversity than other fighters, but that could probably be argued. look at fox and marth. both have such drastically different playstyles (fox is technical as hell, hella fast, etc, marth is hella mobile, has amazing punish and spacing) yet they both consistently place high in tourny. Look at the results for Apex 2013 (http://www.smashboards.com/threads/official-apex-2013-results-thread-jan-11-13-2013-new-brunswick-nj.332658/) there are 8 different characters that placed in the top 8 (9 if you look to top 10 because somehow axe mastered pika lol) and all of those characters play so differently and have such drastically different movesets and options it's crazy

@MIB yeah we know that lol

........fair enough

[strongbad]

Also, just to add on, because of it's improvisational nature, people are able to fucking crazy things like in these vids:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwDHs6UXgR8[/youtube]
(skip to like 1:30 for actual matches since a lot of the spacie tech doesn't really make sense if you don't play)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Y8rQ_0zNIg[/youtube]

[Hiro]

sweet music.

[C.Mongler]

smash is children's party game