After all these gosh ding dong years I finally secured a copy of melee for my GameCube and just. Wow.

All that wacky history aside I do think there’s a certain charm to this game that is missing in more recent smash titles like ultimate (not to say ultimate isn’t good, the legacy ultimate is gonna leave behind is ginormous!) but those GameCube sound effects, music, and models are just something that makes my brain happy and I cannot explain why. I enjoy collecting trophies unlike those fucking NFT jpeg stickers we have in ultimate. I love unlocking characters (and I don’t remember every character that’s unlockable and how to get them so it feels really cool to me) there’s a lot more modes than I thought also giving the player an immense game run and more of a reason to come back to this title. I enjoy the single player it a lot unlike ultimate where I would boot it up just to play with friends or try out the newest hit character for like an hour or 2. (Man do I hate ultimate? I gotta stop ripping on it!)

Just a genuine classic and an important game in the history of smash bros., nintendo, and probably gaming as a whole I dunno.