I'm just not super interested in video games outside of Melee these days. I haven't kept up with the industry or the new games/consoles for nearly 10 years now; I've only really held on to Melee and a couple other classics that I sometimes come back to. I'm coming up to 30 years old and I'm just not as interested in video games anymore.

Also, I've been playing Melee competitively since 2006. It's not just a video game in a series to me; it really is its own entity in my life. When Brawl was announced I was super excited about it. I was heavily involved in all the Smashboards discussions and updates leading up to its release, and I gave it a shot for a year before admitting that it just wasn't the same. Melee was special enough as a game and as a community for me to go back to it without any second thoughts. I think there's something to be said there - not many series' have seen that kind of eagerness to return to an outdated title.

When Smash 4 was announced and it looked like Nintendo was continuing in that direction, I just stopped caring altogether. I figured it could surprise me, but I didn't care enough to watch closely. And honestly, remembering all the furious debates about whether Brawl is a fit competitive game, how we just needed to give it time to develop into the strong community that Melee had, and how its community loved it just as much... then watching the Brawl community drop that game like a 10 ton brick... I don't know, it made me a little cynical. It makes me wonder if there's a difference between being a community and being a franchise community. I'm not interested in just following whatever is new because it's the new and popular title. I love Melee for Melee, I love the community, no future titles offer either of those things.

With all of that said, I think Nintendo should cut content from Ultimate to make it more alike to melee and come back to the right direction. We would have an updated game and even if it takes them years to tweak the character movements until it is exactly like the old one, it would shift slowly the playerbase to a new game that can be played in new consoles, new tvs with new controllers.