I just wanted to quickly say something about the "camping" argument in the past couple of pages.



In a genre of (fighting) games where your win condition is directly related to your health, it would make sense to protect yourself from losing health. After all, if you lose too much health, then you lose, plain and simple. The ideal solution, then, becomes "don't get hit," which encourages spending time away from your opponent and spacing them out. So, in other fighting games, what alleviates this? What makes the games into trades of blows and exciting action instead of campfire songs? Well, there are three things, and they all work in tandem: the timer, the player and the genre's standard rectangular stage.



The timer forces players who are losing to put extra effort and risk into forcing the winning opponent into a losing position. The losing player will always have to fight back, as long as the timer is short enough. Consequently, the winning player has to have good defense in order to maintain the lead. Matches don't usually go into time, though, because the winning player wants to kill the other player more quickly so that they have a larger lead and a more secure victory. Otherwise, why not just have 1-hit kills like Divekick? (Divekick is a great game, but, like Smash, it isn't exactly standard. That's not a bad thing, as you all know.)



Skilled players can craft near airtight defenses if they're using the right characters, while those same skilled players can break apart otherwise strong defenses with rushdown. This is the balance in fighting games. Your skill lies in how well you can balance offense and defense, and how well you can read and respond to your opponent. And the key is that you're always alert, and always playing your best. In a tournament setting, you'd be hard-pressed to find players who are "taking it easy" when they're in the lead. Why? Because the opponent, trying so desperately to make a comeback, is always a threat. As long as you can't evade them, you have to deal with their attacks, and that makes the whole fight work.



The stage itself is important as well. In standard fighting games like SF4, SG, BB, and such, there is a limited amount of space (hard walls and usually low jump heights) that you can use to run away from the opponent. This makes running away from them not that great of an option unless there is very little time left, where the winning player realizes that he has a better chance of winning by letting the clock run than by getting through the other player's defense and winning that way. Some characters (such as Dictator) have full screen teleports, and even then those matches aren't "campy." It's because there's no room to run around. You're constantly in each other's face, something that the game reinforces by limiting how far away you can be from your opponent at any given time (the screen won't expand even if there's supposed to be walking room behind you, so you'll hit an invisible wall).



So, understanding those three elements, what can we determine about our own beloved franchise? Smash can accommodate a timer (somewhat unconventional, but it exists) as well as player skill, but the nature of Smash is to have open stages with plenty of room to move. The screen won't lock to keep you a certain maximum distance away from your opponent. You can move towards, away, up, down, and all around relatively easily, outside of the opponent's pressure or zoning. Knowing this, I think you have to recognize that Smash as a game series, because of its stage design, is inherently campy. The only upside is that there's a limited amount of land to stand on, but all of that extra air space is great for avoiding your opponent.



Consequently, Zoning exists in every fighting game. SF4 focuses on pokes when both players are walking back and forth, SG relies on a hyper rush / hyper keepaway dichotomy, SWR makes you back up your projectile zoning with meaty melee attacks, etc. Smash's zoning is different, and it can't be similar to the rest because of the stage layout. The top players in every game realize that getting your safe space and reading your opponent is the smartest and safest tactic, and so it exists in every fighting game known to man. Smash is no different, and we shouldn't expect it to be.



tl;dr - Smash, like every other fighting game, has the concept of zoning. It's very different, however, due to its stage design, and so we can't necessarily expect Smash to be as fast nor as energetic as other fighting games. It's just different. It may be hyper defensive by comparison, but that comparison isn't necessarily a fair one.