Recently I released a video series highlighting what I believe to be the “best” combos of Project M 3.6 with every character in the game. When I first compiled my list of selections, I had no set criteria for what kind of combo would be ideal, nor could I really quantify what led to my final choices, but the discussions that I’ve had after that series released made me start thinking about the concepts of style and coolness in smash, and what those things really mean. My answer isn’t really what I expected it to be, but hopefully the thought process behind it is interesting to read.

While there is no singular definition of coolness when it comes to smash, the general consensus seems to be that something must be unusual to be “cool”. A great deal of the fun in good combo videos is attempting to guess how a stylish player is going to continue or end their combo, and then being proven wrong by whatever they come up with. When I was selecting my clips for the aforementioned video project, most of them had one thing in common: nobody watching that set would have predicted that string of actions by the player being featured. Nobody would have predicted Juanpi would use Yoshi’s neutral b glitch to seal a crazy zero to death combo, and every other Ike on the planet would have attempted to keep Filthy Casual offstage to continue their edgeguard, rather than bring him back onstage for a totally unique and unexpected combo. That’s what makes those clips fun, and sets them apart from the combos that we might not think of as cool.

Part of what I think makes unpredictability such an important part of cool combos is the fact that we’ve seen how combos are viewed change over time. Things like Falcon’s stomp to knee or Wolf’s shine to flash were considered genuinely hype combos in their own right, but now they’re semi-jokingly referred to as easy and guaranteed, the kind of thing that’s only exciting if the match in which it occurs is already hype. That’s a big part of why different people have different reactions to the same combo, they’re more likely to find something exciting if they haven’t seen something similar before. A great example of that is this clip of mine, which got posted to Reddit and received over 60k views from people who seemed genuinely amazed by the options that I picked and the way I executed the combo, but the response from my friends and practice partners was much less enthusiastic because they’ve all seen the individual components of that combo before. The bar for a combo being cool is constantly being raised, because as new things get developed or become more commonplace they go from being new and exciting to just another part of what’s accepted as “normal gameplay”.

The point of all this is something simple, there is no formula to being cool in smash. There’s no combination of reverse hits, footstools, or spikes that will make a combo as cool the thousandth time you’ve watched it as it was the first time, because that’s just not how it works for me, although your tastes and how you perceive combos maybe totally different. Something that I thought was really interesting from a recent episode of The Reads was the concept of playing to be cool vs playing to win and being cool through being so excellent at that. The combos that were featured in my video series were a mixture of both. The Flarp combo that I used for Luigi was something that I deemed cool not because it was something super unorthodox, but because he took Luigi’s combo potential to its max in the most efficient way possible, and there’s a special kind of beauty in that because you so rarely see optimization to that extent. On the other hand, the Bluezone clip I selected for Falco is the exact opposite. It’s flashy, and suboptimal, and something I would never have thought of in a million years, and that meets pretty much all the criteria I tried to describe earlier. Both combos are fantastic, and I’ve revisited them on several occasions because they impressed me a great deal, but they did so for entirely different reasons. Next time you do, watch, or fall victim to something and think to yourself “woah that was sick”, take a second and think about what made it cool. Maybe you’ll learn something about how you approach the game in the process.