Underrated Smash/FGC Channels

hi

Smash content is pretty beloved, even if Ult youtube < Sm4sh youtube. People enjoy lots of different creators, and today I’d like to shine some light on the lesser-known creators of Smash/platform fighters/FGC. Some of these are Melee/Rivals related, but you should check those sections of this blog out even if you don’t play the games— I find these channels to be enjoyable regardless of whether or not I play the games they’re talking about.

Adam Carra

This video is plainly one of the best I have ever watched (even if one or two jokes fall flat). I’ll try not to harp on production value for too long, because that is a pretty common theme among all of these channels. The editing in this is phenomenal, and it is a great supplement to the meat of the video. This video brings up so many unique points about single player modes in fighting games.

The consensus for fighting game/Smash single player is almost always some variation of this:

”Single player is ass, except for Subspace”

And there’s never a discussion beyond that. The video above looks so much deeper into the conversation, and the ideas it presents are nothing short of brilliant. Drawing parallels between developing DOOM and how Smash’s single player SHOULD be developed is quite an interesting and surprisingly effective concept. You 100% should check out that video.

Adam’s channel has public videos from over thirteen years ago, though they aren’t super relevant to where he is now. His channel ranged from general gaming topics, and, for the past ~4 years, has focused heavily on Rivals and other platform fighters. The whole idea of Adam’s channel now seems to be that he’ll talk about anything he wants relating to platform fighters. The last couple videos from Adam have seen a meteoric rise in quality.

He’s also a pretty big figure in the Rivals community, given its small scale. Adam was one of the central figures in both Rivals Direct and Rivals Direct 2.

turndownforwalt

Similarly to Adam, turndownforwalt has phenomenal production value. Walt’s channel is primarily focused on competitive Melee analysis. It’s often not a traditional set analysis you’d see from a top player, but more towards EXTREMELY thorough analysis of specific interactions. This formula is commonly used in one of Walt’s main serieses, “Frame Data.”

Although it’s name is rather basic, Frame Data does a great job of analyzing obscure interactions, sets, and tournament runs in Melee. These videos are typically only 10-20 minutes long, and thus are very digestible.

Outside of analysis, Walt posts community netplay combo videos titled, “Netplay and Chill.” Back when tournaments were still occurring, Walt’s most common series was “The JV5”, which was a compilation of the 5 best plays at a certain tournament. Digestibility is a common theme in Walt’s content, as these videos are typically no more than three minutes in length. The one exception to this rule is “ONE THE MIC”, in which Walt interviews Melee players and personalities. There are only three episodes— two are fewer than twenty minutes, and the most recent is over an hour long. I’m going to assume that third video is indicative of how the series will evolve.

Walt’s content is extremely entertaining and informative, even for non-Melee players. With a new wave of Melee players due to rollback, there’s really no better time to start paying attention to Melee.

Akshon Esports

You’ve probably heard of theScore Esports. They’re a large team of people who create content, though they create content on such a wide variety of games that they come across as out-of-touch with the communities and games they’re producing content about. In a word, their content is largely ionless and appears as if it is mostly for money.

They also made a highlight reel of Genesis 6 without even ing TOs, so fuck them

I consider Akshon Esports a significantly better version of theScore eSports, despite having only one fifth of their subscribers. Akshon Esports mostly sticks to Overwatch, and, when they do step away from their main game, the videos feel mostly well researched and made with the intent to tell a story, rather than a cheap grab at some extra money. I find their restraint irable, because they definitely *could* just do what theScore does and make videos requiring extremely superficial research and knowledge, but they try to stick to what they know.

They rarely make videos on Smash— I believe they have only one or two videos on the subject. However, the past three months has also seen a Rivals video, and ARMS video, and a Mario Kart Wii video on their channel. Judging by this pattern, it seems they have an increasing interest in making Nintendo/platform fighter videos (they also did a video for Skullgirls, so general FGC stuff may be to be expected).

Their content is very focused on analysis, but that really only holds true for their OW videos. When talking about platform fighters, they simply recount some events going on in a community, such as in their video on rollback Melee. They have videos on smaller esports that detail a game’s entire story from release to present day (ARMS, Rivals, and Skullgirls are all examples).

the narrator’s voice is also ear sex but you didn’t hear that from me

AsumSaus

AsumSaus is probably one of my top 5 favorite channels, and he’s seen a ton of growth in of content. For the longest time, AsumSaus was strictly a Melee highlights channel (not sure if that term is appropriate ngl). The videos are certainly on the shorter side, but they’re treats to watch nonetheless. What initially drew me to AsumSaus was the goddamn hilarious titles and thumbnails. AsumSaus somehow always has a funny title and thumbnail for a video.

The themes in these videos were often really hype or really funny. Some of the charm in these videos definitely came from the “fun facts” left in by AsumSaus. Several times a video, yellow text would pop up on screen explaining some statistic or fact related to what was going on in the video.

That style of content was something that I loved, but AsumSaus shifted to new horizons pretty quickly. This may have had to do with all of his videos randomly being demonetized. AsumSaus released “Enjoying Melee” and “Melee As A Religion” on the 9th and 16th of November, 2019, and the videos were just him and his friend(s) playing netplay. After this, AsumSaus made lots of videos about jank/tech in Melee (The videos “Low Tier Odditties”, “High Tier Odditties”, and “Melee’s Weirdest Glitch” are pretty representative of this phase of AsumSaus’ videos).

AsumSaus does have some more opinionated/analysis videos, and I especially enjoy those. “How Many Characters Are Viable in Melee?” and “Is Melee a Good Game?” are pretty goated videos, although I don’t agree with everything said in the latter video. The latter of those videos even made it into Armada’s stream, and Adam reacted to the entire 40 minute video.

Core-A Gaming

These guys are pretty fucking incredible. They make FGC related content, and most videos they make aren’t even related to Smash. However, the video essays these people make are incredible, and they have some pretty great production value. I personally enjoy the video linked above, because it reassured me that I wasn’t a lunatic during week 1 of Ultimate when a handful of dummies on Twitter were asking for nerfs and I wasn’t.

Their analysis videos are by far their most popular videos, garnering millions of views on single s. The topics are pretty varied, and they can range from mindgames to game development/balance. Most recently, they produced a video about commentary in the FGC. Because content about commentary is pretty barren, this video was extremely informative. The interviews with a bunch of commentators made it feel like a bite-sized documentary— it’s seriously great.

FullStream

I fucking love fullstream

FullStream is the former #1 Rivals of Aether player (sponsored by Panda Global), though his play suffered from a hiatus from competition. He regularly streams and posts content on YouTube, mostly about competitive Rivals. His content focuses on a number of different aspects of Rivals, though competitive Rivals is the main focus. He took a ~2 year break from making videos, though he’s been significantly more active starting ~3 months ago.

FullStream has recently started a series in which he details how to play every character in Rivals, which is likely a big help for anyone who plans to pick up the game on Switch. The videos show characters’ strengths, weaknesses, combo trees, and more, which is sufficient base-level knowledge.

Ignore how repulsive the Panda Global Zetterburn skin is, this game is gorgeous 99.9% of the time :p

What I enjoy most from FullStream are stream highlights— given that Rivals has far more plentiful combos, it’s much easier to get stream highlights packed with sick combos.

Conclusion

I probably have one or two more bigger blogs left to put out for TW. I’m mostly going to be focusing on small latest feed posts, because I’m going to start doing more summer homework soon (I’ll probably be driving home from vacation around the time that I post this).

Please, some of the channels listed here. I know there were a lot of videos in this blog, and watching them all would take hours, but it’d be great if you could pick one or two of these channels to start watching. They’re all putting out some great stuff and are worth checking out.

#TwilightWings

#Macine