Is Project+ Broken?

[@OrangeToadGamer]

I honestly wish *Project +* got more coverage like this. Since it came out around the height of Ultimate's DLC, I feel like it went under the radar for most people in the community

[@jjtheenton]

Probably for the better. We have my forgotten what happened to PM.

[@gridenboat]

@jjtheenton To be real. I would rather have P+ be an underrated gem than nothing at all, killed by nintendo being gun happy. I'm glad that a video like this will still bring new people to the seen.

[@Gestersmek]

Part of me has hope that more people will start checking P+ out when they've finally had enough of the Ultimate meta.

[@duskpede5146]

it'll get a boost when the brawl rollback netplay thingy gets completed

[@stachemallow]

@@GestersmekBattle of BC 6 just had two Yoshis, a Lucario, an Ice Climbers, a Jigglypuff and a Banjo in top 12. I think Ultimate's meta still has some juice.

[@The_SOB_II]

"due to the way it's used you can only use it once per use 😊😊 Edit: It sounded weird to me at first but "Honest'ly,' it made me really happy. F perfectionism

[@zekeciavarini1833]

"It honestly goes to show how far this mod has truly developed to where this game has became today and it truly shows the amount of work that has been put in by the devs." 🧐

[@BlahNetworkBro]

“And they even gave him startup and end lag changes making bowser have a little less armor sure, but they traded this by making him more faster!”😮

[@Magic_Ice]

Bro needs a subscription to Grammarly

[@Roman_the_black_cat]

I mean...hes not wrong 🤣

[@vvlaze]

He does have a bad habit of waffling sometimes

[@StanleySophana]

The best thing about P+ is that every character is balanced

[@nahor88]

Yes, something that Nintendo could never achieve, not that they really care. They did patch characters in Ultimate, but it wasn't fine tuned with a focus on competitive viability. Melee SD Remix actually did something similar to P+, but Nintendo will never permit it at tournaments. We could see such a vast array of characters placing high.

[@GHNeko]

Former PM Dev here. Love the content. :) It a shame we never got to release Knux in PM so I'm glad P+ did it since we were working on Knux (and some other characters) before we shut down lmao. Keep P+ alive homie.

[@echospace7347]

Bro you gotta hop on development with them!

[@gamesincharacter5106]

@@echospace7347 we’re still waiting for the rest of the cast I miss the P+ updates notifications

[@doodle1488]

I love how zack uses station square and rumbling in the streets at the same time, actually both songs have the same mofti

[@kirbythe64]

Knock knock, it's Knuckles

[@Roman_the_black_cat]

The Blowblower, the magical emerald holder~

[@stupidw33b52]

props to honest content for his impact on the p+ community

[@Fliprez]

They need to hurry up and make slippi for this game lmao. Once they do I and so many other people will actually play it

[@vvlaze]

The Brawlback team is actually working on rollback for Brawl! It’s progressing slowly but surely, with them saying that this year will be one for growth of the project as they wrap up matchmaking and rollback.

[@TopOfAllWorlds]

​@@vvlazebrawl and pm are different do it's probably going to take awhile to adapt it to pm yeah?

[@yeans3rdor4thchannelicantrembr]

there is already online because it's a brawl mod. but there is going to be rollback for both this game and brawl soon which I'm super pumped for!

[@vvlaze]

@@TopOfAllWorldsCoverage for mods is part of their mission. Plus, it’s mostly just on making rollback work with the engine, mods don’t change that much. Its like how mods like Beyond Melee still work just fine with Slippi.

[@RandomDude647]

Rivals 2 has extremely similar mechanics to project+ and is gonna have rollback

[@WolfMeister_69]

Very nice video! keep it up with the honest content!

[@mr.j1401]

Jesus Christ I can remember back when you only had 1k subscribers. Glad you're getting a lot more, keep up the amazing work my guy.

[@lorenzomcbo7229]

I love the philosophy of making everyone broken, so no one is. Zelda and link feels so fast and strong, while not being that highvin the tier list

[@arnox4554]

"making everyone broken, so no one is." That would be SSB64.

[@Nightwalker86]

Sure let's write an essay. Former P+ dev here, let's go through the list in order. 1. Bowser was never a low tier, and official tier lists are generally trash. Also, the version that Malachi used to win a tournament was certainly too good, but we really didn't nerf Bowser that much from that version. If someone put Bowser as a high tier for P+ I would be inclined to agree. 2. I wrote up the design goals for P+. One of them was to normalize attributes to reduce non-matches. Let's say I play Fox and you play Kirby, and I can move and attack faster than you can just move- are we really playing an "interactive" game at that point? So we wanted to address this, and normalizing jumpsquats to 3-5 frames is a feel-good way to do this, but realistically has a very mild effect on balance, if any at all. In this way, the real targets for P+ changes I would say are 3.6 GAW, Wario, and DK. All of which were top tier threats and just too easy to play relative to how good they were. I think GAW was balanced correctly, and maybe Wario is a bit under-nerfed but generally done well. But DK was essentially ignored and is definitely one of the outstanding dev mistakes in P+. 3. One of the goals for P+ as I wrote it was to balance around 3.6 high tier. The idea that you want a powerful and engaging cast because it's more fun. About 15 months into the project that got changed (and I fought it like hell) to "narrowing" the tier list. The problem with this approach is two-fold. First, it encourages special treatment of some characters by artificially keeping them good relative to the rest of the cast. Particularly, this was favored by unnamed Lucario / MK / Wolf players. In my version, you just set a goal and let the pieces fall where they may organically with no special treatment. Second, the first ~30 characters had already been designed around 3.6 high tier, and only the last 10 or so weren't. So this is why Lucario, MK, and Wolf are probably better than they should be. It's impossible to separate personal politics from such a project. 4. We didn't know how to balance Lucas. We brought in an outsider for help, but made a major mistake- buffing Magnet via lowering the SDI modifier. Lucas is sort of like Lucario and Wolf where the character has cherry-picked elements to make their combo game work better. So for example, Wolf's bthrow is just Falcon's dthrow but facing the other direction. And that's fine basically if balanced correctly. Similarly, Lucas upair is specifically engineered to have an angle (70) to offset Magnet's trajectory as a conversion, to enable it to combo really well. You could imagine if Lucas upair was angle 90 like Ness has, then Magnet > upair would only give a couple hits, rather than them canceling out and giving him a much larger combo. The problem is that Magnet is basically a super move, it's a shine (read: lagless) that pulls you in like Sheik bthrow or Marth's front hit of uptilt does, and is attached to a small, fast character that is going to "dashback" whether his shine hits or not. This really isn't the kind of context that you want to be super reliable from a balance POV. So Lucas ends up being much more dangerous on average for P+ than he was in 3.6. He could still do these things in 3.6, but the Lucas player had to be much better about following irregular DI/SDI inputs. 5. The guy who relabanced Pit after 3.02 into 3.5 and 3.6 insisted for years that Pit was still fine and not gutted. I think he's the only one that thought so. Everyone I know thought 3.5 and 3.6 Pit was trash, myself included. I was on the sidelines for P+ Pit balance changes, and sometimes I think his buffs were a little too fair. That said, the character really opens up a lot if you base your conversions around throw > c stick down for dash attack. 6. Fox is absolutely not as good as he is in Melee. He's way more frail and having lots of viable heavy characters makes upthrow (and grabs in general) a much worse conversion tool. Fox being A tier is correct, and he's worse than Sheik and Falcon as far as Melee characters go. 7. I voted for adding Knuckles (and blocked Lyn) for P+. But Knux definitely needs some nerfs. His throws are just a little too free for how good his CC grab is. Although I'm not sure if that's better solved by attributes versus elsewhere. 8. Something you didn't address- I think tilt stick was a mistake. We added it not understanding how much it would benefit certain characters like Ike, Sheik, or Ice Climbers. We also should have made it such that attacks always beat grabs, completely eliminating grab armor. At the time we debated it and arrived at no real conclusion, but in retrospect it was clearly the correct move to make. Great video overall. At the time of writing, I think DK, MK, Lucas, Lucario, and Knuckles could have been handled better. But overall I'm happy without final product and would grade myself an A-

[@yungmuney5903]

Why would tilt stick ever be a mistake? That's like an anti-player mindset.

[@aviator2777]

@@yungmuney5903 tilt stick is great, we shouldn't punish tilt stick players because the smash stick players refuse to learn/the game was poorly balanced for it

[@fordmooney8404]

P+ rules thank you for your contribution

[@aarong8099]

Official tier lists are decent imo, but like any other tier list they aren’t definitive fact, even if called “official”

[@bluyu]

@@aviator2777 As someone who plays Melee, Brawl, Project+, and Ultimate (And probably Smash 4 again at some point), I agree. I can use both smash stick and tilt stick. Tilt stick makes way more sense in terms of game design, and I honestly just prefer it. If you could turn off smash attacks using the analog stick + an attack input, that would be really nice for doing quick tilts while having C-stick smash. I love Melee, but tap jump is one of the most annoying things when you do it on accident. Honestly, they should just implement a universal button remapping mod at this point, as well as the ability to disable tap jump. It would make Melee feel a lot better to play for both newer players and older players, and if you don't want to change anything, then you don't have to. From an accessibility perspective, there's no reason you shouldn't be able to customize your controls to your liking. All modern games allow you to do it. Even looking at it from a competitive standpoint, it's still definitely a good thing. A truly competitive game shouldn't drive away new players. Without newer players, we have fewer people who might potentially become top players that push the meta. Some things will be easier, but overall, you'd still have to practice tech with the same timings. You'll just have more methods of performing said tech available to you, and won't develop arthritis as fast.

[@evangel1460]

PM and P+ is the best version of Smash hands down. Great technical skill, fun changes. Playing Zelda in P+ was some of the most fun I had in a smash game with all the weird orbiting fireballs and her teleport cancels. Doesn't matter how broken it can feel at times, it's class.

[@intranube]

Despite not being Perfect and probably no fighting game can be, P+ reduced the gap between character tiers so much that, if you are creative, you can deal with most match-ups without relying on playing one or two S tier characters like in melee, and for that, the PM and P+ devs have my gratitude. Characters have so much depth to their gameplay that, honestly, you can just pick your favorite character, compete and have fun while having a decent shot at winning.

[@MrWin-pj4sg]

A good drinking game would be to take a shot every time he says "in my opinion".

[@mattb6522]

Good video! This was pretty interesting! I love Smash but have never played Project+. It looks really amazing! Kudos to the developers of this mod! I may have to give this one a shot! I always appreciate so many awesome projects the mod community does to breathe new life into older games!

[@TeamCrossbody]

If the design of the character is good enough and they have everything needed to compete people will often still use them competitively despite where they fall in the overall meta.

[@BillyTheTeen95]

Sad to not see Yoshi mentioned. But great video! Love seeing how this game has progressed! 😁

[@ZachHonest]

Yoshi was always a more underrated character in P+, I think they for sure have potential tho!

[@shaan__real]

i really hope p+ rollback comes soon. i love playing the game but the person i play with is either across the US with me having mid internet, or i am closer with good internet but have to use a VPN cause of university shit

[@shalokshalom]

Parsec is how Ultimate players got around the bad netcode.

[@trilli_1]

Your conent is amqzing, thank you so much for bringing us this form of entertai ment based on this amazing videogames. Ur a real one 🧡

[@TheHeteroHero]

Really enjoying all your videos

[@BigDnotimpressed]

Love using Bowsers fireball!

[@Ethanimale]

the way i watch all your content and then just saw you were subbed to me lfg

[@AnyThingWorx]

6:40 repeats itself a couple of times in a row lol

[@laneuwu1660]

metaknight has as good of neutral as zss but with faster and safer normals in exchange for the range. I think that metaknight has an easier time in neutral than zss and can run the lead better because of how strong his camping is

[@Sleeplyboi89]

Fire video ❤

[@666blaziken]

My only complaint about p+ at the moment it is that I think some characters have better recoveries and they should, Mario for example gets a full refresh on his Mario tornado every time he is hit, while other characters like Marth and Lucas get diminishing returns on their secondary recoveries. Minor nerfs 2 tornado like this would help a lot

[@Phillyrider807]

You can't just compare recoveries and not the rest of the kit. Both Marth and Lucas on stage potential is alot higher then mario which makes their "soild but not amazing"" recoveries fair.

[@666blaziken]

@@Phillyrider807 Mario's on-stage game is pretty strong in its own way. He outranges lucas, and compared to marth he has significantly easier kill confirms. I'd say his on-stage game is balanced. Even then, if his down b had a diminishing return like a lot of the cast did (like maybe 80%) of his height back, his recovery would still be amazing and mix-up heavy, but you get more reward for edgeguarding him. I always appreciate melee and p+ for having a lot of recoveries that are mid at best (barring a couple of exceptions) which naturally helps change the pace of someone edgeguards really well, and I would hope mario gets slight nerfs to fit that philosophy. Overall, my complaint is minor and p+ doesn't have to change a thing and I'd still be very happy with the game's meta, but IF there was something I would change it would be homogenizing the recovery rules a little bit more.

[@Phillyrider807]

@@666blaziken Yea I wasn’t trying to downplay Mario. I’m well aware of how good Mario is in p+. I’m just saying you can’t compare recoveries in a vacuum like that.

[@666blaziken]

@@Phillyrider807 that's good, you're right about that.

[@tylermoran8702]

Mario doesn't get a full refresh on his tornado after he is hit, he only refreshes the move if he touches the ground, same as luigi.

[@CrumbCCM]

I have played many mods from many games and nothing does it anywhere near as good as what P+ has done. The best way to play the franchise both casually (tied with default Ultimate I think) and competatively. As someone who likes playing everyone, I dont know how they managed to get everything right.

[@endersalasa3396]

Wait so Charizard doesn’t have a fire type special move anymore? Doesn’t that seem strange?

[@eddiesantana3009]

is the matchmaking on brawl dead now ?

[@sweetbabyjesus80]

I cant get p+ to run like im not setting it up right

[@anonymous7024]

3:19 RIP Link

[@lasercraft32]

Charizard using an electric attack sounds weird... But only if you know nothing about Pokemon. Charizard CAN learn Thunder Punch in the actual Pokemon games (though honestly, Fire Punch or Mega Punch would have been more fitting).

[@ArthurMassoni]

What is the song that plays during the first half of the video?

[@FieldsOfConfusion]

Rumbling HWY from tail's mission Mission Street

[@gamrgool4521]

If everyone is broken, nobody is.

[@icemann6017]

song at 3:15 ? it sounds so familiar

[@nolanl3343]

Pretty sure it's one of the hub world songs from Sonic Adventure.

[@jaywalk65]

sapphire is beautiful man 🙏🩵💙

[@Bravenwolf22]

my boy Roy was good in this before he was good in ultimate, also this game is so much better than ultimate

[@omarmendez0402]

Project M has new items, assist trophies and pokeballs add on it?

[@vvlaze]

I’m not sure, honestly. I know they added the item that activates turbo mode (the ability to cancel the endlag of a move if it hits) but I’m unsure if there’s more past that.

[@gridenboat]

P+ content 🗣

[@picklesbeslidin9829]

bro they need to stop being such prudes and add characters again like lyn and isaac

[@vvlaze]

Maybe, but I also respect wanting to focus on the roster they have, having a consistent roster to develop a meta around is an enjoyable thing, it lets things shift and grow rather than focusing on the next big thing. Plus, there’s other mods that do scratch the itch for more characters. PMEX is a bit over the top, but it’s definitely fun.

[@ksemanr]

Lyndis was like 90% done and Isaac was like half done, why are they still not around?

[@ZachHonest]

To respect the devs because I've talked to many of them, both of those characters were far from being complete. Lyn mightve had potential at one point, but ultimately the idea ran out of steam. They both available in PMEX tho.

[@Mahgnum]

WE LIKE IKE

[@crocworks]

If everyone is broken, no one is.

[@shaneh3109]

You should cover smash pmex remix

[@BigDnotimpressed]

Junebug thinks Project M Donkey Kong is overbuffed. But many others myself included believe DK more than deserved the buffs considering how mediocre he was for too long.

[@ryanchan8740]

I hate the balancing technique of, "let's just make every character feel the same" if a character is known for being a heavy tank the way you should balance them if they are bad is by making them heavier and even more tanky till it evens them out to the rest of the roster, not make them faster and reducing there tankyness to balance it out

[@yungmuney5903]

Yeeeaaah no, it would lead to serious and infuriating polarization and we would get shit like Little mac, min min or kazuya.

[@ryanchan8740]

@@yungmuney5903 you're right, having Mario Mario and Mario is way better then having characters that feel vastly different from one another

[@yungmuney5903]

​@@ryanchan8740 Yeah because bowser currently plays the exact same way as mario does 😂. Gimme a break.

[@ryanchan8740]

@@yungmuney5903 yeah, but when the way to "balance" a character is making them play a lot more like the rest of the characters physics-wize it does seem like that's where people want it to be

[@vvlaze]

Normalizing movement works to make characters have more access to similar tools, that’s not a bad thing. Ultimate gave the whole cast a universal 4 frame jumpsquat (except for Kazuya) and it’s done wonders in making them feel more responsive. I get what you mean, but making a character faster does not make them all the same. That’s ridiculous and you know it. They all have unique tools, gameplans, attributes, win conditions, ect. Bowser is still Bowser, he’s still the heaviest character in the game with tanky armor, big hitting smash attacks, grappling with Koopa Claw and using Whirling Fortress to have an incredible shield game. Idk, point is, the characters do feel vastly different. Having a higher baseline just allows characters to actually keep up better, because when those baseline attributes are too low, you get things like Melee Bowser that are too slow and miserable to keep up.

[@timmasters1195]

i feel like fox being ranked that high says a small amount about how P+ players feel about Melee.

[@mttkra]

He's not bad, a huge part of P+ is based around juggling your opponent, and fox is fast enough that he can threaten that space. He does have 20+ extra years of lab work behind him which matters a ton, but quite a bit of that is showing in his ranking. Fox really can never be worse than A in P+'s build unless fox himself got heavily changed simply because his general strengths work very very well in most matchups. There isn't a character below A that I think fox has a less than favorable matchup versus. His punish game and juggle game is worse than the top tiers, and his reach isn't as good. I think if some other characters had a similar amount of lab work they would be significantly better than fox, but those characters don't, so rank less favorably. Fox is fox. The problem with P+ is how juggle focused it is and some characters are infinitely better at it than others.

[@timmasters1195]

@@mttkra I agree, a huge amount of what P+ folk think of Fox is about the lab work and (to some extent) level of the Melee players that used him to win events. In time I can see him being superceded, especially in a game where so many characters can kill him so easily.

[@Monhamd1000]

Heh, a late April fools joke.

[@2girls1up]

Subbed

[@thepooroldsoul8179]

Meta Knight is still at the top, that should answer this videos question.

[@lordmew5]

Firstly I didn't know you were hot secondly they nerfed luigi for no reason.

[@shayanmanteghi5662]

Nowhere near is broken as Brawl-!

[@tripelon]

The best smash ever

[@EmeraldBlade98]

Why does every smash game find it necessary to make sure kirby is always trash

[@ZachHonest]

Smash 64 has entered the chat.

[@fordmooney8404]

Kirby is really good in P+ trust me he's a menace

[@CdGrifter]

Kirby has hands in Project+. Very fun combos

[@shadestrider1033]

They gave Charizard Wild Charge? He can’t even use it in the games, why give it to him here?

[@Blaziken20052000]

It's actually Thunder Punch.

[@shadestrider1033]

@@Blaziken20052000Seems a bit too full body to be a “punch”

[@Blaziken20052000]

@shadestrider1033 it's literally called Thunder Punch lol, it was in the trailer and I literally play the character

[@vvlaze]

The move was called thunderpunch in the P+ reveal trailer. In fairness, Charizard has kiiinda stubby arms. Any punch animation for him that’s satisfying will likely look like he’s hitting you with other parts of his body at the same time.

[@shadestrider1033]

@@vvlaze fair enough

[@BearBear0498]

People play this game?

[@WolfMeister_69]

FIRST!

[@BuddyHolly94-e4j]

Project + isn’t broken it’s a masterpiece.

[@vvlaze]

Honestly, the term “broken” has taken on a whole new meaning in fighting game circles. It’s used too often to just describe things that are strong or powerful, rather than things that are dysfunctional or literally broken.

[@BuddyHolly94-e4j]

@@vvlaze agreed i think we need 2 terms to describe stuff for characters the ones that are too powerful should be called "overpowered" and the ones with broken gimmicks should be called truly "broken"

[@intranube]

@@BuddyHolly94-e4jCertainly. Fox's shine in melee is broken but fun, IC's 0 to death grabs are plainly broken. Ivysaur's laser in p+ is strong but fair. "Broken" certainly does not mean " any strong move i can't think how to deal with " it's more close to " action that breaks the game and makes in unfun and unfair", think of Ivysaur getting a solarbeam after every grab.

[@BuddyHolly94-e4j]

@@intranube yup I agree one thing P+ did for better was making characters less broken and more balance compare to the 3.0 days were every character was broken but that comes with a cost making the characters too balance that could nerfed a character to being not good like pit and game and watch

[@Fedivdicher]

The biggest nerf to fox initially was having to use the disgusting brawl design, thank god they added the REAL Fox McCloud back into the game even if he does have the use the brawl voice clips

[@themetapod]

The brawl voice is good. Unlike the tr4sh and Ultimate voices

[@yungmuney5903]

Brawl design is peak wtf are you on about. Nostalgia blind.

[@themetapod]

@@yungmuney5903 fr

[@Fedivdicher]

@@yungmuney5903 bro brawl was THE game a played growing up, I have no nostalgic memories for melee, I genuinely just cant get down the the visual designs of the starfox characters in all the post brawl games

[@CdGrifter]

Brawl has the best designs and voices for all the Star Fox characters. The melee version of Falco and Fox look ugly af in comparison.