Smash Bracket General Philosophy
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The Philosophy of Smash Bracket
At Smash Bracket, we’re dedicated to trying to find the canonically strongest character in Super Smash Brothers based on the feats that they’ve demonstrated themselves. One of the most important things for us in this series is consistency in how we handle the characters we examine. While we can’t be perfect, we’re intent on trying. To help us achieve this goal, Ink and I put together a rules document that would guide the series. But these rules were written while only taking into account our own natural thinking preferences. As a result, they’ve ended up being quite confusing for other people who aren’t on the exact same mental wavelength as us. While they did serve their primary function by keeping us much more consistent and focused than we would otherwise be, it didn’t do a good job conveying our underlying philosophy and left many people confused.
Upon reexamining our approach, I’ve realized that the biggest misunderstanding regarding our rules came from the fact that we’ve never properly explained the underlying philosophy that led to those rules’ creation. The truth is that the entirety of our rules — both the pre-established ones as well as ones that have only been discussed internally within our team — can be summarized by a set of three fairly simple points that guide our decision making. Our method really is more of a philosophy than a hard set of rules. So throughout this article as well as future ones, I am planning to use the terms “philosophy” and “ruleset” mostly interchangeably because I feel like “philosophy” is more accurate, but “ruleset” is more in line with what people expect.
The three pillars of our philosophy are as follows:
Feats must be proven to be valid instead of proven to be invalid
All feats and characters are subject to real-world logic and physics to as high a degree as is possible
We use a hierarchy to determine the importance of feats that prioritizes displayed feats more than statements.
To some people, this philosophy makes intuitive sense while to others it is incomprehensible. I plan to thoroughly explore each part of this philosophy in a way that should help anyone come to understand how we handle our characters, even if they do not necessarily agree with it.
Starting Characters From Zero
Being Skeptical of Everything
Above all else, this is the part of our philosophy that is most vital to understand. While there are a variety of things that set Smash Bracket’s approach to characters apart from other Vs battle discussions, this rule is what sets it apart above all else. From our approach to scaling, our insistence of feats being displayed, and even our hierarchy of feats, all of it comes down to how we implement this philosophy.
One of the primary consequences of this philosophy is that we are inherently skeptical of every claim made about every character.
Kirby can suck up enemies and steal their powers? Okay, prove it.
Mario can break blocks with his head? Okay, prove it.
Pit can fly (sometimes)? Okay, prove it.
You get the point.
While these examples are obviously easy to confirm by looking at any amount of gameplay for each character, they accurately portray our mindset and process. We try not to assume anything about characters until they’ve demonstrated conclusively that they are able to perform the feats that we’re considering. The more extreme the claim, the more concrete the proof required.. If your friend tells you he can punch through a thin wooden block, you might be a bit surprised, but you probably wouldn’t have much reason to doubt him. But if he told you that he could punch a tree over in one blow, you wouldn’t believe that until you saw it happen. Even then you would probably want to double-check to make sure the tree wasn’t weakened beforehand.
This mirrors how we treat every character in the bracket. We don’t believe that a character is able to perform a feat until they’ve proved to us beyond a shadow of a doubt that they can. Many people seem to take an opposite approach to this. They inherently trust any feat performed or statement made about a character and only throw it out if it can be disproven beyond a shadow of a doubt. This ties into several points that I will discuss later in this article, but for now, just be aware of the position we are starting from. We never try to disprove a feat or throw it out. Instead, we simply don’t use feats that don’t hold up under close examination. To build off our metaphor from earlier, if your friend handed you a book of pictures and statements claiming that he could dodge lasers and lift cars above his head, you would probably want to take a closer look before you fully believed him.
It might often feel as though we ignore obvious feats for seemingly insignificant reasons, but many feats that seem solid at a casual glance don’t hold up under scrutiny. Here’s a great example of what I mean. In this video, a girl is pranking people by making them think she is able to lift extremely heavy buckets full of coins. The people being pranked don’t have our perspective or knowledge about what is going on. To these people, it seems like there’s undeniable proof that this girl is significantly stronger than they are. Had the trick never been revealed to them, they might have felt justified in this belief for the rest of their life. However, if they had dug deeper to verify what was happening for themselves, they would have discovered that her strength was only an illusion.
Just like in this prank, our point of view is often limited while we’re experiencing media. This leads to feats that, without broader context, can seem extremely impressive. Even if you completely understand the context of the feat, it can often still hold up under a cursory examination. If you are examining a feat with the idea that it is valid until proven otherwise, you’ll probably end up keeping it. However, when you assume that nothing is true until it earns its keep, many feats like this don’t hold up.
We can find a good example of how this principle affects feats by examining Phazon from the Metroid Prime series. Phazon is a substance that has very consistently been described as radioactive. We see many examples of its radioactive properties, such as mutations, quick death from exposure to it, and its effects on the environment and ecology of the planet. From this evidence, many people assume that Phazon should possess other effects of radioactivity, such as being dangerous at close distances or contaminating nearby objects and making them deadly as well. However, a closer examination of Phazon and its effects reveal that it doesn’t actually deal any damage to creatures right next to it; it only hurts those making physical contact with it. It also doesn’t significantly contaminate objects in its vicinity, and damage from Phazon exposure will stop once contact with the Phazon ends. If you are already operating under the assumption that phazon is the same as true-to-life radiation, these points may not be enough to discredit the feat. But when you are trying to establish the feat without any previous assumptions, these points are certainly enough to cast doubt on Phazon’s radioactive properties. In this case, we couldn’t give Phazon any characteristics that would make sense for traditional radiation if it hasn’t already been demonstrated.
Another example is Solaris from Sonic. Throughout the story, he’s portrayed as the god of time who exists in a higher dimension. He’s said to eat entire dimensions, exist beyond the conventional understanding of time and space, and exist in all times (past, present, and future) at once. He is so consistently described this way that disproving his super-dimensional existence is quite difficult and requires many assumptions. However, when we try to prove that Solaris is a super-dimensions being who exists beyond time and space, we immediately run into a ton of extremely critical problems. All of the information about him is either sourced from legends or from his own aspects. Despite supposedly existing in all times at once, the entire story is about stopping Solaris from being created/brought back in the first place. Notably, it’s impossible to prevent something from coming into existence if it’s already supposed to exist since the beginning of time. In the future that Silver the Hedgehog came from, we can see that both of Solaris’ aspects were free but hadn’t merged into Solaris. Instead, they needed to go back in time to meet the conditions for merging and free Iblis. Add on top of that how extreme the claim is for Solaris to be such a transcendental existence (and remember that more unbelievable claims require more concrete proof) and there are definitely too many holes in this theory to hold up.
This kind of examination is why Smash Bracket doesn’t end up using many feats that are widely considered acceptable. When you try to examine feats critically like this, remarkably few hold up. While many people say that this is a result of a flawed system, we believe that it is simply a natural consequence of applying real-world logic to fiction. And while many people believe that trying to apply logic to fiction is a fruitless endeavor, to us it is a completely essential part of analysis.
Using real-world logic and physics to examine fictional worlds
Fictional worlds often have many things that don’t make any sense when examined under our current understanding of the world. In fact, seeing things that can’t be explained is often one of the biggest draws of a story. But in that case, isn’t it hopeless to try and examine things like magic or time travel with our real-world model of physics? What reason is there to even try to apply physics when so much about these fictional worlds is going to work differently?
What it really comes down to is that, in order to get an accurate comparison of how feats stack up next to each other, we’ve got to put numbers to as many of them as we can. It’s really hard to know whether it’s more impressive to stop a speeding train or shatter a boulder with a punch with intuition alone. So to measure things like this, we’ve got to apply physics to the situation in order to learn how impressive a feat truly is. By using physics, we’re able to get a pretty good approximation of how most feats stack up, measuring everything from destruction to speed to punching someone into the sun.
Where things get a bit more tricky is when we try to measure things that physics generally deems impossible. Faster than light travel, if we were to try to be extremely realistic, would either be completely impossible or introduce a massive host of problems. And a lot of feats live in a weird gray area: you can’t actually punch someone hard enough to send them into space because that amount of force would just destroy their body beforehand. And that’s not even mentioning things like magic that just can’t be represented with our current understanding of the world.
But in order to try and be as accurate as possible, we need to be able to put some numbers to as many feats as we can. This concept is pretty universally agreed on. Where opinions deviate is on how closely one tries to stick to their understanding of the real world when analyzing feats. At some point, you have to start making concessions, and which concessions you make and when you make them can drastically affect the end result of a feat. While I don’t think that there’s any set of rules that could perfectly cover all scenarios, both because physics is complicated and because fiction has infinite possibilities, I will do my best to lay out Smash Bracket’s approach.
The first thing to understand is how and when physics can apply to fictional scenarios in the first place. To use an earlier example, it’s not actually possible to punch somebody into space because their body would give way far before they were launched that high. However, we can calculate the force it would take to launch someone into space and just kind of ignore the part where the mechanics of the punch transferring that energy to a body break down. The end result is still an accurate measurement of what it would take to send someone flying, we’re just squinting a bit at the delivery method. In general, this is how we approach measuring feats: we look for some part of the feat that correlates to something we can measure with physics, and then we measure that.
This method holds up surprisingly well for analyzing a wide variety of feats. We don’t actually know how much energy it would take to use magic to create fire, but we can measure the energy of the fire, and that’s what’s being used in the attack anyway so it’s fine. It’s not possible for someone to create a planet out of nothing, but we know how to represent the energy of that planet so we can get an estimate anyway. Gold would deform before it shattered from an impact, but we can ignore that and figure out the energy it takes to shatter gold even though that’s basically impossible.
But fiction also generally has its own sets of physical rules guiding it. Most fictional worlds treat speed and the power behind an attack separately, despite speed being the most important part of inflicting damage normally. Most worlds also ignore the fact that you endure the same amount of force that you exert. There’s also magic systems, faster than light travel, and lots of other weird stuff that shows that a world is operating under a different set of rules than our own. In these cases, how could we possibly approach measuring a feat?
The best way would be to use the established system of physics for a world, but it is extraordinarily rare for a world to give enough information about its mechanics for this to be viable. After that, we fall back on our real-world understanding of physics. And finally, if we can’t apply either of these methods, then it’s something that we can’t represent mathematically. The most important part of this process is to be consistent, otherwise you start getting calculations that give incredibly wrong numbers. This is best illustrated with examples.
Let’s take a story in which a character can throw punches faster than the speed of light. In the story, the character still hits about as hard as a normal person, he can just punch really fast. This is a situation where the story has established that physics works differently than in real life. If we were to apply real physics to this situation, the character would be punching with infinite energy. The story never treats the character as having infinite energy though, so it wouldn’t make sense to give it to him in this instance. Here, we can clearly understand that using our interpretation of physics will give us a completely different story than the one being told.
In another example, we have an instance where a story is being told about a very mundane family living a very mundane life. It’s entirely character focused and has no impressive feats. However, it also has official measurements for the size of the planet that it takes place on, and by using those measurements we can find out that the gravity of this planet is actually 30 times the gravity of Earth. In this case, we can apply real world physics to a situation in order to better understand how impressive these characters are when taken outside of their story. Knowing that they are roughly 30 times stronger than an average human doesn’t change anything important about the context of theri story, but it does allow us to get a more clear idea of how they compare to other fictional characters. This is an example of when real life physics can be used to interpret otherwise ambiguous feats or even create them out of things that seemed mundane before.
But where it gets really tricky is when we have something that looks like real physics should apply to it but acts like fictional physics applies to it. The most notorious example of this, in my experience, is the black hole. It is extremely common to see something that is consistently called a black hole and exhibits minor characteristics of a black hole, but doesn’t exhibit any major properties that we would use to distinguish one in real life. In this instance, many people say something like “you can’t expect a fictional portrayal to be perfectly accurate” and then they treat it as if it were a real-life black hole. But the danger in doing this is that you are using something that is far more established as the fictional equivalent of a black hole and giving it properties that it has never displayed.
To illustrate why this is a problem, imagine a story in which the main character uses a wooden staff to beat up the bad guys. He’s just a normal martial artist, the staff looks and acts like a staff in combat, is used by other normal people occasionally with no problems, and is overall indistinguishable from another piece of shaped wood. Now imagine that throughout the story, this staff is consistently described as an energy weapon with the mass of 100 suns that can phase through opponents and destroy their souls. Every piece of dialogue about the staff says this, but it is never demonstrated once. Would you feel more comfortable treating it like normal wood or some extraordinarily powerful energy weapon? I know that I would prefer the former.
While this example is a bit too obviously contradictory, it is illustrative of the kinds of problems that we run into when we try to measure things based on how they are explained rather than how they have demonstrated themselves to behave. With black holes in particular (and other physical phenomena in general), we cannot apply real world physics to them unless they meet all our qualifications for accepting that phenomena in real life. If they don’t, the only way we can represent them is as a fictional shadow of the real-life equivalent. This might feel like it’s putting an undue burden on the author to know how to represent some complicated circumstances, but it’s important to understand that if all these criteria aren’t met, the circumstance being portrayed isn’t the one that our physics describes anyway.
If a story were to present a “rock” that acted like a liquid, changed its shape based on your emotions, and could move under its own power, most people wouldn’t treat it like a rock. If a beam splatters against a wall like paint, it shouldn’t be treated as light. While these examples seem obvious, that’s only because they are more intuitively understood. Our approach is to treat every kind of feat with this same level of scrutiny, and if something doesn’t meet the criteria to use real world physics, then we don’t use real world physics. If we can’t find a logical explanation for how something is operating, then there’s no way that our model of science would be able to describe it.
So when a black hole in a story doesn’t suck up everything around it, or when normal birds can escape it, or when a character gets sucked up and can be seen inside, we don’t use physics to examine the black hole. Even if the story consistently calls it a black hole, the best we can do is treat it as a black hole operating under the fictional physics of its world and do our best to model it according to that.
The Smash Bracket Hierarchy of Feats
The final pillar of Smash Bracket’s philosophy is its hierarchy of feats. By this, we mean the level of importance we give to feats based on the source that they originated from. Here’s a high-level overview of this hierarchy:
Feats directly demonstrated in cutscenes. This means something a character performs without input from the player (or a quicktime event where player input doesn’t directly control the actions of the character). These scenes can establish both feats and anti-feats.
Feats directly demonstrated in gameplay. This means things a character does while the player is in control of them. These scenes can establish feats, but we don’t consider anti-feats from gameplay unless it is an extremely consistent and intentional weakness (such as a type of block being unbreakable without a power up).
Statements and lore from within the game. This means exposition from the game, information and dialogue from reliable sources, and narrative descriptions of events. These scenes can support or clarify feats but cannot create them. They can also create anti-feats unless those anti-feats have been contradicted by cutscenes or gameplay.
Statements and official information from outside the game. This includes things like official guidebooks, statements from the creators, or official websites. These statements can be used to support or clarify feats and anti-feats but cannot create them.
Other official sources. This includes things like alternate media (manga, anime, books, etc.), spinoff games, and alternate canon versions of a character. In most cases, these will be considered purely to contextualize the character and their abilities rather than interacting with feats in any way (for instance, we can learn how a character is perceived and how others view their abilities, but we wouldn’t take anything they actually did from this media). This is mostly helpful for establishing what could be considered an outlier. In rare cases, we might consider this type of material with more weight, but that’s usually only when there’s a lot of evidence that it is canon or should be considered a primary source.
This overview should be enough to understand how to use any particular source within our ruleset, but it doesn’t do enough to answer why we consider each source with their listed priority. I will dive into each point in detail shortly, but first I want to talk about why we insist on seeing feats demonstrated in the first place and how it relates to scaling.
Invisible Feats and Scaling
In my mind, there are two types of feats: visible ones and invisible ones. A visible feat is something you can show to anyone and have them grasp how impressive it is. An invisible feat is something that requires explaining in order to understand. For example, show a character punching a rock into powder and most people will have an intuitive sense of how impressive that is. That would be a visible feat. But if you have to explain how that rock had actually been shown to survive attacks that destroyed several worlds before ending up on Earth, and therefore the attack actually had to be considerably more impressive, you’ve got yourself an invisible feat.
I don’t believe that either kind of feat is inherently more meaningful or valid than the other. However, visible feats are almost easier to show and explain, with the added benefit of actually showcasing the character doing something themselves. Invisible feats, on the other hand, take prior knowledge to understand and are almost always actually about something that someone else has done. There are a lot of characters who, when you sit down to analyze them under a different ruleset, you end up learning nothing about the characters themselves and instead learn everything about the people around them. Or you’ll have a game where the cast is completely interchangeable with one another because they all scale to one person, despite no one ever actually demonstrating visible feats on that level.
Once again, there’s nothing wrong with focusing on the invisible feats that a character performs. In fact, it’s probably the best way to handle extremely in-depth research into an entire franchise. However, when you want to take a character in isolation and display what they themselves can do, visible feats are going to be the best way to demonstrate that to people who aren’t familiar with the franchise. When we created Smash Bracket, we wanted to create a series that showed off what a character was actually capable of themselves. We focus on the visible feats because that gives us the most clear picture of what makes a character uniquely powerful. However, we understand that scaling and invisible feats are central to these kinds of discussions. You can’t get an accurate picture of a fighting game character without comparing them to their opponents, for instance.
Unfortunately, scaling is heavily affected by our method of building up feats instead of tearing them down. Most bosses and enemies you fight in most games don’t have any feats, and out of the ones who do have meaningful feats there’s usually a dozen reasons why you shouldn’t scale to that boss. This means that the kind of scrutiny we apply to every other feat is suddenly turning world-shattering threats into jokes that can’t punch their way out of a paper bag. That’s… not ideal. So how do we resolve this? How can we make these invisible feats visible in order to use one of the most important parts of these stories?
The first and easiest answer is to treat these enemies as statements or lore. Just like other statements, this means that they can’t create feats of their own. Instead, they serve to back up other feats and establish an intended level of strength for a character (I’ll get more into what this means in a later section). This is how we end up treating the bosses and enemies who don’t have enough demonstrated feats of their own for us to compare the heroes to.
The second and more impactful way is to look for feats that are directly comparable. That means that we need to find a feat that the boss has displayed, then find a feat that the hero has displayed in comparison to the boss, and then approach that with our usual level of scrutiny. If the feat holds up, it becomes a valid instance of scaling. If it doesn’t hold up, then it’s back to the lore-pile with the feat. At the very least, it serves as evidence backing up the narrative about the hero and villain. And if it holds up to close examination, then we’ll have a new visible feat for our hero.
One consequence of this approach is that scaling is almost always limited to a single degree. When character A scales to character B who scales to character C, it becomes very easy to lose something in the transfer between characters. This makes it extremely uncommon for this kind of scaling to hold up to any degree of skepticism. But it also means that when we do find visible scaling feats, they are very clear and easy to explain and demonstrate.
Let’s go through a few examples to show what this all means in practice.
Ken and Ryu are both characters from Street Fighter. They fight frequently and are often shown to be about equal with each other. At the beginning of the series they were literally interchangeable, but as time went on they became more distinct if still very similar. As the lore of the franchise developed, Ryu was shown to have some incredible power inside of him that he could tap into in certain moments to drastically boost his strength. During these moments, he clearly surpasses Ken and gains the ability to fight on a whole new level. When we try to examine these fighters, we realize that there is an extremely consistent narrative that they are on equal footing. We can confirm that for ourselves in a huge variety of ways, from looking at game data for their moves to the techniques that they use to the fights that they’ve had in their stories and how they handle each other. We have seen many examples of them having similar strengths, speeds, and durability. But when Ryu powers up, he is no longer on the same level as Ken. While there are some arguments that would let us scale Ken to this higher level, there are far better explanations for Ken’s strength than him being equal to Ryu. So here, we will scale Ken to base Ryu, but not Ryu when he’s powered up.
King Dedede is a sometimes friend, sometimes enemy from the Kirby franchise. He is often an obstacle in Kirby’s way and is able to fight Kirby for a while before losing. However, there are many possible interpretations for why Dedede is able to fight with Kirby without being as strong as Kirby is. This includes the fact that Dedede seems to get possessed with unusual frequency before he fights Kirby, the fact that Kirby doesn’t usually seem to be using anywhere near his full power throughout most of his games, and the fact that Kirby never even seems to be trying particularly hard to deal with Dedede. Given the multitude of other explanations that are just as, if not more likely, we can’t scale Dedede to Kirby in most of his stats. It is important to note, however, that Dedede does have several visible feats of his own that help him out. This includes being a canon companion with Kirby in some of his games, having measurable feats of his own, and even knocking Kirby out one time. This last one, in particular, means that his attack ability would at least be as good as Kirby’s durability, since that’s not something that could be realistically explained another way.
Hopefully these examples make the process more clear. Just like any other feat, we approach scaling with the mindset of “can we explain this in any other way?” And when there are other answers that are just as, if not more, probable then we will use those explanations. That doesn’t mean that we completely ignore scaling, but it does mean that simply beating an enemy is not enough to make a hero as strong as the enemy was.
Demonstrated Feats From Cutscenes
Our highest priority source of feats is to try and find them directly shown in a cutscene. During cutscenes, there are no worries about gameplay mechanics, player ineptitude, or engine limitations affecting what kinds of feats can be shown. The game is free to demonstrate a feat of any scale without worrying about the usual design constraints that gameplay would bring. These are always the most trustworthy source and they will usually have statements clarifying any ambiguity as well.
These feats are placed first in our hierarchy due to our prioritization of visible feats. Reliance on statements above all means that you often end up being unable to use the things that are shown on screen or the things that are shown become irrelevant to what is described. By limiting ourselves to measuring what a character has actually performed, we are given the opportunity to examine them from a fresh angle. We’re also able to more easily share visual proof of the feats, which is a very big plus when we are making videos about these characters.
Because cutscenes are free of limitations imposed for balancing reasons, objects and abilities added to accommodate or challenge players, or design elements that are simply added because they are fun, we get a very clear picture of the characters during them. This means that when we see a feat we can trust it. But this also means that when we see an anti-feat, we can’t dismiss it. While the plot does occasionally demand that a character is portrayed as being far weaker than any reasonable interpretation would lead you to believe, these kinds of anti-feats are handled by the same methodology that we use for feats. That is to say, they need to hold up to skepticism and scrutiny and outliers will be discarded.
Feats Demonstrated Through Gameplay
Gameplay is the most abundant element of a game that we have to look through. Some games have dozens of hours of content to play through. As such, it is often the most clear look you can get at a character. Unfortunately, there are some problems introduced due to the nature of the player controlling the characters. These problems can cause inconsistencies with how the character is portrayed. Sometimes these problems are a result of a lack of skill, sometimes they’re design elements that are introduced for fun or challenge without considering how they interact with the intended power of a character, and sometimes the problems are just due to the constraints of storytelling in a medium where somebody else in in control of how the actions play out. These problems are enough to make many people shy away from the idea of using gameplay entirely, deeming it rife with “game mechanics” that ruin a pure representation of the characters they love. It is my opinion, however, that the philosophy of Smash Bracket serves to mitigate most of the problems inherent with gameplay. The rest of the problems are shared with any kind of story to one degree or another, so they aren’t a concern to me.
The most important point to bring up about gameplay feats is that they are still subject to the same process as everything else we look at. We aren’t forced to accept a feat or mechanic introduced in gameplay simply because it is in gameplay. We are just as, if not more, critical of the feats (and especially anti-feats) that come from gameplay. Our process of starting every character from zero eliminates almost every gameplay-related problem on its own. We aren’t trapped into the most literal interpretations of what happens on screen just because we want to preserve gameplay. Instead, we filter what happens through every other step of our hierarchy to come to a result that makes sense.
Anti-feats are treated with an extra amount of scrutiny. Just because Cloud can’t jump on command in Final Fantasy VII doesn’t mean that we don’t believe it when he jumps dozens of feet in cutscenes and movies. And just because your level 100 Arceus could technically be whittled down eventually by a hoard of level 1 Caterpie doesn’t mean that we believe that the god of Pokemon is weaker than a bug. These kinds of anti-feats simply don’t hold up to our standards of consideration, so they don’t hold any weight.
One unique thing that gameplay can offer us that not many other parts of a game do is a look into what kind of challenges the creators feel are appropriate for the characters. For instance, in most JRPGs your character starts off by fighting very weak enemies. As you get further into the game you fight stronger and stronger enemies until, by the end, you’re usually fighting something that’s a threat to a nation or a planet or something greater. If the game has you fighting bunnies all the way up to the final boss, it really begins to call into question how strong your character is supposed to be. While these patterns don’t have any actual meaning for establishing feats or anti-feats, they are a massive help for establishing a character’s intended level of strength when considering outliers. If the story of the game keeps talking about how you are the only hero who can deal with the incredibly deadly monsters in the wilderness, but all you ever fight are normal caterpillars, it gives you insight that the people of this world are incredibly weak. It’s not a conflict with the story, it’s a clarification of the story. Despite this really unique and helpful point of view, though, this element of gameplay is pretty much at the bottom of our hierarchy. It’s a great way to filter the story, but it shouldn’t supersede it.
One worry that I see brought up a lot is that using gameplay means ignoring parts of the story or treating them as inferior. But when there are apparent contradictions in lore and gameplay, we find that is usually because the lore doesn’t live up to the examination that we give to all parts of the game. I’m reminded of when I was a boy scout as a kid and had to get a badge to represent my new rank. I was going to become a “bear,” so I was told that I’d have to retrieve that badge from a bear myself. All the “lore” I was exposed to confirmed that it would be an actual bear. When I went to perform the task, I could hear extremely convincing bear noises coming from the room I was meant to enter. Yet when I went in to fight the bear and claim my prize, it turned out to be one of my leaders pretending to be a bear and he just handed me the badge. To this day, I have technically never been told that man wasn’t a bear.
Had I limited my understanding of events to the stories I was told, I would still believe that man was a bear. Yet clearly, that would be an absurd way to handle the situation. Likewise, lore will often fall apart under inspection, and when we’re then left with only gameplay, it can feel like we’re seeing a very different picture than what was promised to us. But that doesn’t mean that we should lower our standards in order to accept stories and statements that don’t add up. It usually just means that the story being told is one slightly different than what we thought. It can be disappointing to learn that the story we’re experiencing is more about the courage to face a bear rather than the actual ability to combat one, but that doesn’t make the events any less meaningful. It just requires you to filter them through a context that you may have not previously considered.
Statements and Lore From Within the Game
The worst part about determining a hierarchy of sources is that it is impossible to avoid labeling one part of the game as inferior to the others. In this case, that is done with the intention to drive home that we handle things in a different manner than what others might be used to. But it is not meant to imply that we view the lore of a game as being less important than the moment-to-moment gameplay. We are simply expecting different things out of lore than we are out of gameplay, and as a result we need to put the story further down in our hierarchy.
A more accurate way to represent our stance on the story of a game is to once again refer to the difference between visible and invisible feats. By definition, the feats that we get from lore and descriptions are going to be invisible feats. There’s nothing to see or measure with these statements. As a result, they become harder to consider objectively and can have massive differences in power depending on how they are interpreted. For example, in Sonic Battle, when Eggman destroys a group of stars, he asks Emerl if he is ready to start collecting energy. Some people interpret this to mean that Emerl is collecting the energy of the stars that were destroyed. Some people interpret this to mean that Emerl is now put in an “energy-collection mode” where he will seek out energy on Earth. Those give Emerl wildly different levels of power, and that’s not even delving into the different interpretations of what “stars” means (both because of translation issues and because of possible ways that a group of stars could be destroyed).
Because Smash Bracket is interested in measuring visible feats, we use statements and lore to give us context and clarification for the visible feats that we’re able to measure elsewhere. In a way, this gives in-game statements the most importance within our hierarchy because it shapes how we interpret everything else. A great example of how this comes into play is in Persona 5, where Joker uses a model gun for one of his weapons. It has literally no mechanisms or capacity to fire at all. But within the story, it is clarified how the weird world of the Metaverse can shape the perception of that model gun to the point where it functions as if it were real. Without that explanation (and many similar explanations over the course of the story to back it up) we would be likely to throw out the game mechanics of attacking with the gun as some kind of weird misunderstanding or abstraction. There’s no possible way to interpret a model gun firing literal bullets, after all.
But when Star Fox 1 says that Fox is flying into a black hole, and all the evidence points to the contrary (it doesn’t look or act like a black hole and it was hiding behind an asteroid without sucking it up), we’re going to side with the gameplay and throw out the statement. Any statement has to be capable of standing up to examination in the face of all the evidence we can gather about its supposed feat, and when it can’t live up to that standard we are forced to ignore it. To do otherwise would be to invite inconsistency and make ourselves more vulnerable to bias.
One thing to note is that while we do not allow game statements to create feats on their own, we do allow them to create anti-feats or weaknesses. They are still held to the same standard as everything else we examine, but since games are often wanting to show the strongest or most fun parts of a character, they tend to skip out on developing the less impressive parts of that character. The story is great at filling in these missing details, but we are still wary to make sure they don’t contradict other evidence.
Statements and Official Information from Outside the Game
Many games put out official guide books or have their developers give interviews about the design process or why they made certain decisions in the game. While these can be great sources of extra information, it is important to note that these outside sources are almost never subjected to the same level of scrutiny as the rest of the game was. They are often the opinions of a single individual, and no matter how important that individual is they cannot give fully accurate insights into what was represented in the game. Guidebooks tend to receive much more attention and can often be extremely valuable and accurate sources of lore or explanations about things that happen in the game, but they are still limited to talking about scenes and feats instead of showing them.
In both cases, they serve as great resources to use to back up confusing feats or gain additional insight into what is happening in the game. A great example of how this can matter is with Sephiroth from Final Fantasy VII. Sephiroth has an attack where he causes the Sun to supernova, destroying much of the Solar System in the attack animation. It makes absolutely no sense when you are watching it in-game because you are still standing on a planet after it was seemingly destroyed. It also seems to conflict with some of the events of the story. However, there are so many official statements about how this attack works that we actually have a very clear picture of its level of strength and how it could be used without causing contradictions. Because of these statements, an attack that might have seemed like nonsense and been thrown out was able to be properly considered and used.
Like everything else, these statements must hold up to examination. There is an official statement about an attack from a Megaman game, for instance, that says the attack is absolute zero. Absolute zero attacks are particularly devastating because they bypass conventional durability and can affect basically anything. However, the attack in question just shot out a chunk of ice. Even if this ice was initially at absolute zero, its exposure to the air would instantly raise its temperature, meaning that it would lose the benefits of being an absolute zero attack. So here, despite an official statement clarifying an attack, we weren’t able to treat it with the stated level of power because it had too many issues.
These kinds of statements are best used to support feats and anti-feats, but shouldn’t be used to try and create either of those on their own.
Everything Else (Like Secondary Media)
There’s a huge variety of other sources that games can use to back them up, from adaptations in manga and anime to spinoff games to real-life treasure hunts that reveal series’ lore (Gravity Falls is so cool). There are too many things here for me to cover individually, but the general guidelines hold the same.
In rare instances, there will be other sources that are considered primary canon. In these instances, we will slot the source into whichever other category of the hierarchy it fits in best. The Pokemon anime and manga, for instance, are both being considered on the level of cutscenes because they are a primary source of canon (we’ll have a more detailed explanation of what I mean here along with our first Pokemon episode, I know that the actual canon of Pokemon is more complicated than this).
In most cases, however, all these other sources simply help to establish the general perception of a character. There’s a lot of Persona 5 manga that is officially published, for instance, but they don’t actually do anything to contribute to the feats or story of the game. Instead, they help to paint a better picture of how Joker and his teammates are portrayed. Sources like this are used almost entirely for determining what should or should not be an outlier (but they’re also a great source for easter eggs in the animation of a battle).
Determining Outliers
After going through all the sources for a character and following our hierarchy, we’ll have a pretty good idea of what should and should not be an outlier. However, it’s a little more involved than just looking at the numbers and seeing which ones are too far away from the center. This is, unfortunately, one of the parts of this process that we can’t boil down to a science. However, our process is about as close as it gets and preserves the intended power of a character fairly well.
When I say “intended power,” I do so mostly for want of a better term. What generally comes to mind when I hear that phrase is “authorial intent,” but that’s not really what I mean here. We recognize that it’s impossible to truly know what the creator was thinking or wanting when they make a character. Instead, our “intended power” is something closer to the average power displayed by the character throughout both visible and invisible feats. We don’t try to interpret the goals or intentions of the developers, but instead look at all the evidence we’ve gathered for what their power level has been portrayed as. This is a combination of their measured feats, the enemies that are considered threats to them, and the story of their games.
Once we have all of that, we look at any mathematical outliers and decide whether they can fit within the intended strength of a character. Sonic the Hedgehog is regularly portrayed as dealing with threats to the planet, solar system, and even universe. This means that when we’re examining his feats, it’s pretty hard for him to have an outlier in strength or speed. On the other hand, when we look at Olimar and see the small-scale problems he deals with, it’s going to make it much harder to justify him having a high level of power.
One of the quirks of this system is that outliers become more reliant on story than frequency. If we were examining a story about a mailman who was supposed to be completely ordinary in every way, we would have pretty clear bounds for what his strength could be. So if he regularly lifts entire houses in order to slip the mail in from underneath the foundation with no acknowledgement from the story, we would be very likely to throw every instance of house-lifting out as an outlier. It wouldn’t take much acknowledgement from the story in order to make us consider the feat legitimate, but without any sort of recognition it makes it feel like the author was simply not understanding the scale of the feat. It’s a tricky line to walk, and I’m not sure what call the team would make given this specific example, but it is indicative of how the overall process ends up relying quite a lot on story and statements at this point.
Bringing It All Together
Hopefully by now I’ve painted a thorough picture of how our team thinks about the characters we analyze. The philosophy we use to interpret feats is one that is based largely in grounding fictional worlds to reality as much as possible and making sure that we can be consistent and logical with our interpretations. While it is not a ruleset that fits every type of discussion, I hope that you can better understand the merits that it does have and why we have settled on using it. I don’t believe that our way of doing things is the only way of doing things. But I do consider it a valid method of analyzing characters and one that has merits that can be applied to any kind of discussion.
