Game Theory: Super Smash Bros TRAGIC Hidden Lore

Get Ready *AMAZING GAME THEORY THEME SONG* Hello, Internet! Welcome to

game

theory

. Where the only way to play is with Hanenbow Deku. What's that? Final destination, no items you say? What are you going to? Casual? Come to me internet! My Pichu will crush you! Seriously, since I know some of you missed the sarcasm, we all know that Hanenbow and Pichu were in different

game

s and that Pichu was the second worst in the game. He was there for comic effect. Now Ganondorf? HA! He's the guy to watch out for. #SarcasticOpeningParagraphIsSarcastic But honestly, Smash Bros. is a game after my own heart, the Internet.

Not because I have friends to play with, because that's certainly not the case. *nervous laughs* *SIGH* But because this game alone resolves more arguments about who would win in a fight than that creepy old guy at the comic book store who smells like sadness and stale Cheeto. Well then! Mario against Link? Samus vs. Zelda? Palutena vs. Shulk? Actually, cross that last one out. And while each matchup deserves a

theory

in its own right, today I want to exp

lore

the history of these games. Yeah! There's a

hidden

story behind the hit series, and for all the game's bright colors and cheerful gameplay, the secret story arc playing out in the background is actually incredibly bleak.

Sad, even, with each installment becoming darker and darker. So choose your character and set your stock to five, because we're getting ready to go on a TOUR DE LORE! A TOUR OF LORE! A LOT OF TOUR! At the end of each Smash game's classic mode is a giant, disembodied, magical white glove known as the Master Hand. Oh, sorry, I should have put a SPOILER ALERT. Oh, I hope I haven't ruined anyone's fifteen minute gaming session. But you have to ask yourself this: why in a game full of Nintendo's biggest characters is the discounted final boss, Glover, here?

Did Mario's glove suddenly decide to rebel? Why are you hitting yourself? Why are you hitting yourself? Why are you hitting yourself? Could this be the result of a technical demo? Does the last fight take place in a magician's dressing room? Eh, probably not. No, the popular theory is that the Smash characters are toys and that the Master Hand is actually the hand of the child who owns them. The fights and adventures that you experience throughout the games are just imaginary scenarios that occur to this little Nintendo fan when he plays. Like at the beginning of Toy Story 3, when Andy mixes all of his toys into one big game.

So let's look at the facts and see if this theory has legs...uh, hands, ugh, gloves to stand on. The key piece of evidence is the opening scene of this game. Roll of tape. From the beginning, we see Master Hand pulling lifeless characters out of a toy chest, placing a few things on his desk to set the mood, and then with a snap of his fingers, the whole scene comes to life like an Indian in the closet. . The glasses and boxes have been magically transformed into a battlefield. Boom, pretty irrefutable evidence for the theory that Smash takes place in the child's imagination.

But there has to be something more here, right? So let's get a little more specific by looking a little closer at the bedroom because it's important to understanding the overall story of the game franchise. Notice the car on the wall, which makes it likely that our son is a boy. The pencils mean our son is old enough to write, the books mean he's old enough to read, the toy box next to the bed means he's still little, and the fact that these toys are stuffed. This is the room of a teenager to a young teenager, probably 12 to 14 years old.

He is old enough to read and write and wants to play his own music, but he still has stuffed toys next to his bed. Remember this because we will come back to it later. By the time we get to Super Smash Brothers Melee, our son has grown up a bit. He's a little older now, in fact we can see his arm for a split second as he pulls Mario out of whatever strange burlap sack he's floating in. But Nintendo's flexible dolls have been replaced by more rigid and detailed trophies. Could this be Nintendo subliminally preparing us to buy more Amiibos?

Probably not, but I definitely want that Reggie Amiibo I saw floating around the other day. My body is prepared for that. But as we can see from his room, visible when we look at all the trophies collected in the game, our young glove enthusiast has become a serious gamer. Look at all the systems in the back, but also look at how organized everything is, how sparse it is. I mean this is certainly not a room for adults, but it is not a room for small children either. More like someone in their teens or twenties. I swear I have the exact same shelf from Ikea and I have the game consoles lined up exactly the same way.

He's someone who grows, matures, and that's exactly what I think Melee is about. And it all has to do with the introduction of Master Hand's strange, evil twin Crazy Hand. Crazy Hand does not move like Master Hand. Master Hand is elegant, delicate, brutal, but deliberate like a mortal mime. Crazy Hand, on the other hand... Haha! The joke of the year! The award for best joke in a YouTube video goes to Game Theory: joke from one hand, from another hand. Thank you, thank you, I couldn't have done it without you and the bad puns. Excuse me, I'm sorry.

Crazy Hand, on the other hand, is erratic, unpredictable. Look at the trophy description of him, "where Master Hand loves to create the alter ego of him being impulsive and destructive consumed by that empty feeling that comes from destroying your own creations." That's about as serious as Nintendo can get. Master Hand is the spirit of imagination, the hand of a creator. Crazy Hand is the angry and rebellious one who cannot be controlled. The impulsive young man who wants to make a mess, play with those trophies, have something on those shelves other than a sunflower and a cactus, maybe a dirty sock or something.

It is the battle that every child goes through as he grows. Fast forward to Super Smash Brothers Brawl and the mysterious holographic butterfly man Tabuu. Brawl featured a single-player campaign titled Subspace Emissary, whose plot was more complicated than Five Nights at Freddy's, which isn't that surprising since Subspace Emissary was written by a guy who also wrote a bunch of scenarios for Kingdom Hearts. You have to hand it over to a team that is capable of creating as many creative titles to avoid number three as possible. Dream Drop Distance, come on guys. Forget Half Life 3, Kingdom Hearts 3.

Anyway, long story short, Bowser, Ganondorf, and Wario believe they are teaming up with a master hand to turn all the characters back into trophies forever so they can never move again. But if Master Hand represents the Creator, the spirit of creativity and imagination, then why would he want to stop playing with all the toys he's been having fun with all these years? Well, not really. At the end of the campaign it is revealed that Master Hand was simply being used as a puppet controlled by an evil force called Tabuu. In case you are not appreciating this wonderful metaphor, let me explain: taboo means something that is prohibited or restricted by social custom.

Many historical taboos have come and gone, such as women not being allowed to wear pants, women not being allowed to show their bra, women not being allowed to keep their maiden names. Wow, a lot of these have to do with women, huh? You know what else is taboo and gender neutral? Adults playing with toys. Children can play with toys, adults cannot. So, well, Master Hand, our child who has now become a young adult, may still want to play with his toys, but society, represented by Tabuu, is forcing him to stop doing so. Even his appearance, an adult with his arms crossed and closed body language, indicates that this is the serious side of adulthood and I have to give props to counter waffle for pointing it out in his personal video.

Well seen, man. Fortunately, in the end, Mario and the gang win and look triumphantly toward the future. The boy we have seen grow throughout these last three games has accepted that these characters will always be part of his life. A couple of years ago this would have been the perfect ending to a wonderful trilogy, but then Super Smash Brothers came out for 3DS and WiiU and Master Hand is still in it and Crazy Hand is still hanging around or whatever. But unfortunately for us there is a new kid on the block. It gives us a whole new level of understanding of this theory and its name is Master Core.

Master Core lives inside Master Hand and if you damage the magic glove enough, Master Core breaks free and it's the most intense fight in the franchise. Master Core takes on many forms, from a giant person to swords, a monster, a giant fortress, and a dark clone of your character before finally revealing his true form: a small ball within a ball with the Smash Brothers logo. The symbol of the franchise and the struggle ends on an incredibly somber note. After all this intensity, the stage goes silent and the ball just sits there waiting for you to hit it.

He doesn't fight back and the only way to lose at this point is if you don't get him off the stage quickly enough. It's strange, it's disturbing, it seems like an incredibly significant moment, but what exactly does it mean? Well, first, let's look here. The fourth game isn't the first time we've seen Master Core. Check it out

hidden

beneath the battlefield on Gamecube. It's almost as if he is some kind of supreme creator, the driving creative force behind the entire franchise. It's almost as if Master Core represents the game's director Masahiro Sakurai himself. Now listen, I've written this stuff enough times to know that it seems like a pretty big leap in logic, but let me explain.

Think about our son who we have seen grow throughout these games. That boy is Sakurai. The Super Smash Brothers franchise is the story of him. Sakurai was born in 1970, meaning he was 13 years old when the Famicom first came out. Remember that this is the same age as the child depicted in the first Smash game. That room in the first game was his room, it was him growing up with Nintendo. Master Hand, the spirit of the creator, is obviously him, he is the one who figuratively brought these games to life in his childhood bedroom and then literally brought these games to life when he was an adult.

Then you move on to melee and Crazy Hand, the desire to destroy what you've built. That's him dealing with having to dedicate more years of his life to this franchise. You do not believe me? Sakurai created the character of Kirby at HAL Labs when he was 19 years old. God, he created a character that changed video games when he was a teenager. Here I was simply pretending to be a woman on stage. I guess we all have our own paths. Anyway, Sakurai quit the company and the Kirby franchise years later because he grew tired of the sequel.

This is a quote from two weeks after he resigned. "It was hard for me to see that every time I made a new game, people automatically assumed that a sequel would come. Even if it's a sequel, a lot of people have to give their all to make a game, but some people think that the sequel The process "It happens naturally." So he wanted to break free from HAL Laboratories when he saw Kirby going down the path of too many sequels and Crazy Hand is his frustration when he saw Super Smash Brothers going down the same path.

He wanted to destroy with one hand what he had created with the other. So what's up with Brawl and Tabuu? This one is pretty obvious. It's the pressure to grow. Brawl is the story of Sakurai having to accept the career he chose. He makes a living making video games and toys, but society tells us that adults don't do that. Subspace Emissary is the story of him rejecting society's expectations and doing what he loves, what he believes in. It is a symbol of a person who has to justify that yes, he creates games and no, not games like Call of Duty.

But then Master Core arrives, and this is where things take a

tragic

turn. You will notice the master core detaching from Master Hand. That is important. It's Sakurai struggling to free himself from his commitment to these games. He is conflicted about having control of the series, being the hand of the creator. Does it seem exaggerated? Should not! Think about the quote I mentioned a second ago. When Kirby became too affected, he left the company. He wanted freedom, he felt trapped and now, five installments into Smash, he feels it again. He wants to break free, but he's understandably conflicted about it.

In a recent interview with Game Informer, Sakurai revealed that making these games has been a huge task and that the strain of it is too much for him to bear. In it he says: "You could say that all the effort made in the past to strive, continue to strive and provide all these additional merits ended up tightening the noose around my neck in the future. That may seem to contradict my desire to continue giving to players as much as I can, but I don't see any easy answers, and yet, despite that, I also have troubleimagine someone else taking my place." Master Core represents this intense personal struggle.

Look at the way the core behaves. He leaves Master Hand, then fights one last fierce fight, but then knowingly gives himself over to us, waiting there like a passive ball, waiting for you to finish it. It's sad, like a fierce animal that fights to be caught but then gives up when it knows it's lost. Sakurai has dedicated decades of his life to these games. 44 years and, although he would like to move on, he knows that this is not the last installment. Melee and Brawl were designed to be the last in the series, but these days a successful franchise is not about to end and he knows it.

He knows he's stuck in a lose-lose scenario. If he doesn't stay on board and hand over the franchise, he'll no longer be the master of his personal creation. But if he stays, they will be. more years of exhaustion, blood, sweat and tears shed in a game when he wants to do other things. He will certainly fight, but in the end all you can do is give up and put it in the player's hands. The player in the game, and in real life, is one and only the player can finish it. Ask anyone who works on a video game and they'll tell you what a personal task it is and how much of themselves they put into each project they work on.

Smash is no different, even if it appears to be a simple crossover fighting game. And if you're surprised by the theory that Smash's big bads could be inspired by a real-life person, then you might be surprised by some of the other characters in the game who have also had real-life inspirations. Click here to watch my friend Matthew Santoro's new video on the topic, where he lists a few more characters who might surprise you as having real-life source material, like Laura Croft. That was the one that really grabbed me from this list. I mean, I'd like to find that real-life inspiration, if you know what I mean.

But before you check it out, be sure to use your Master Hand to hit the subscribe button or click here to check out the rest of our Nintendo theories playlist. You clicked on this video, so you clearly must like Nintendo. So click here and find out how Bullet Bill or the hook could be deadly, how Link could already be dead and how Mario can be a sociopath, but hey, that's just a theory, a game theory, thanks for watching. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go make Hanenbow with just Deku nuts. Pichu destroying it.