So people are talking about L-cancel in Super Smash Bros Melee over in Elon’s World, and I have thoughts on this topic which would be better expressed in a single post than in a twitter thread.
I appreciate that you touched on hitstop here, that aspect of the conversation seems to go missing too often. In traditional fighters, people seem to mostly agree that the ability to hitconfirm is a skill worth testing, so the idea that L-cancelling rewards the ability to distinguish hits from whiffs is worth some scrutiny.
As for shield drops, fuck 'em. I'm down to remove spotdodge from all future Smash titles if it means I can have baby-easy Z+Down platform drops from SSB64 again. I miss you.
Comparing L-cancel to hit-confirming idea is one I hadn’t really considered! I think there are some limitations to the comparison but it does remind me of a point connected to the hitstop argument that says there’s an interesting strategy in potentially running into your opponent at low % (probably with crouch cancel) to force a missed L-cancel and punish because they expected the move to whiff. I think I have other problems with that from a design perspective, but that may be functional as an analog to traditional hit-confirms in a game like Melee, where much of the game is played “in advance”, so to speak
Yeah, I'm not going to argue that a successful L-cancel is meaningfully a "hitconfirm" in nearly enough situations to justify its inclusion in the game, but it's a nice framing to think about edge cases like Fox dair IMO. As designers, what skills do we want to reward players for, and why? What sacrifices should be made to create a context that rewards those skills?
the world isn't ready to hear "crouch cancelling is a conditionally available parry"
okay but no joke crouch cancel didn’t start making sense to me (and by extension stop making me mad) until someone described it as “basically like parrying”