Brawl: Competitive or Casual?

 One of the most surprising things about Melee was it's competitive following. Without online play, the community had to band together and help teach newer players the tricks of the trade personally. Then tournaments came in, and the whole thing took off. One of the remarkable things about Melee was how it catered to the competitive player and the casual one. There were competitive maps like Final Destination, and then there were casual maps like Icicle Mountain.

 But rather then embracing the competitive community as they did in Melee, Sakurai shot it in the face. While Melee was precise, Brawl is floaty and unbalanced. Many characters have been unnecessarily nerfed(Captain Falcon) and the majority of items make the game to random, too unskillful. Many of the new maps are simply uncompetitive, whether they be easily too easy to throw someone off or simply kill players, and many have stupid gimmicks like Wario's map. No map has succeeded in coming close to Final Destination, and even some characters are broken. Take DeDeDe, for example. He can grab people and grab them again before they leave his grab range, but this only works on some heavy characters. The rest he can grab 4 to 5 times giving them an extremely small window where they can control their character.

 The online has banded the community together in a new way: Against Nintendo. Awful lag in every game, a matchmaking service thats more like an A.I upgrade then playing against humans, no choice whatsoever  for what game type you want to play. With Anyone ( the aforementioned  online matchmaking service) is a joke. The only way to get a playable game is through your friends list and this is limited to 64 people. There is no way to communicate outside of a sentence long message for each taunt. 

 Nintendo has tested the patience of the competitive community, and without reason. There's not even any leader-boards!