Information and Reaction: Mr. Sakurai Presents “Steve & Alex”

While Masahiro Sakurai is a bit notorious for his in-depth looks at his Super Smash Bros. characters, today’s presentation for Steve & Alex – released just in time for Minecraft Live 2020 – dug as deep as this pun is shallow. Eschewing the history of Minecraft or as many side details, this put almost all of its focus on the latest wild moveset to grace the shores of Smash. And what a moveset it is! We’ve got the details of the Minecraft crew below.

Fighter #77: Steve / Alex / Zombie / Enderman (shortened to “Steve” for clarity)

• Release date: October 13.
• Neutral Special: Mine / Craft / Create Block: the main tenant of Steve’s moveset, in which you mine for materials to use during the fight.
  • Mine: On the ground or next to walls, Steve mines materials, whose materials and rate of mining is different depending on the terrain. This means that Steve’s abilities are somewhat dependent on the stage chosen, and to compensate, Battlefield and Omega stages all work on the same pattern.
  • You can only carry so many materials, so mined objects will eventually replace older ones
  • Craft: Steve’s tools are all repaired or crafted at the same time, using your highest quality materials first. From worst to best, the types are wood, stone, iron, gold, and diamond. These aren’t just in terms of power; their degradation rate and speed are different, as well.
    • Specific quantities are also needed; for example, you need four iron pieces to craft an iron sword.
    • The crafting bench can be destroyed by any participant, though it’ll come back shortly. Steve can also press the special move button while shielding to summon it. Steve can also use any crafting bench.
  • Create Block: Steve builds a block in the air, starting with the cheapest materials on offer. This is the move that forced the development team to adapt every single stage for Steve; they needed to ensure players could place and connect blocks across them, on top of requiring resource data for mining and using materials.
    • Midair blocks degrade faster the further offstage they are, and there’s a hard limit for how far off the stage you can build.
• Side special: Minecart: uses iron (to build the cart) and wood (to create the rails, though those apparently aren’t required) to shoot forward in the cart. It can pick up enemies, and you can jump out of it any time. You will also create powered rails if you have gold and redstone on hand.
• Up special: Elytra, a free gliding move similar to the gliding mechanic from Brawl.
• Down special: TNT, which requires more common materials than in the original game. You can also build a pressure plate with redstone, but it’ll otherwise break upon impact or after a time.
• Final Smash: House of Boom.
• Steve’s icon in the match is accompanied by a gauge showing most of the materials they have on hand (other than redstone).
• Steve extensively uses weapons during battle: a sword, axe, and pickaxe. These can degrade and break, but they can be repaired and replaced by crafting materials. One – the forward smash – is based specifically on the original Java Edition of Minecraft.
• Other Minecraft moves include lighting fires with a flint, summoning a magma block, spreading lava, and dropping an anvil. Steve’s throw incorporates a fishing rod and piston.
• Steve’s initial jump is awful – it’s even shorter than Little Mac’s and can’t reach the first platform on Battlefield – though their midair jump is better. The poor height is meant to more comfortably facilitate the block creation.
• Steve’s taunts include a bow, a jump, and eating steak.
• Small visual touches: Steve’s sleep and perfect shield animations are copied directly from Minecraft, they look up and down as you tilt the control, and Kirby’s Steve “hat” instead gives him a blocky overlay.

Stage: Minecraft World

• A randomized stage based on multiple environmental biomes, all of which feature a day / night cycle. Destroying terrain can reveal extra platforms on some versions of the stage.
• Biome types: plains, birch forest, savanna, taiga, snowy tundra, and stone shore, all of which have different styles. However, the exact same materials can be found on the base ground of the stage, allowing some consistency for Steve during competitive play.
• Multiple visual details can only be seen using the developer camera, such as background villagers asleep in their beds.

Music (original track in bold)

• “Halland / Dalarna”
• “Earth”
• “Clockwork Crafter”
• “Toys on a Tear”
• “Dance of the Blocks”
• “Glide”
• “The Arch-Illager”
• Sakurai declined to use any music from the original Minecraft, as he felt it was too placid. Instead, the songs come from mini-games and spinoffs.
• All the remixed pieces were composed to match with the day / night cycle on Minecraft World.

Spirits (it’s not clear if they continue onward after the last one)

• Zombie
• Creeper
• Skeleton
• Slime
• Enderman
• Villager & Iron Golem
• Ghast
• Piglin
• Ender Dragon

Mii Fighter Costumes

• Creeper (Minecraft) (Brawler)
• Pig (Minecraft) (Brawler)
• Diamond Armor (Minecraft) (Swordfighter)
• Gil (Swordfighter, and returning from Smash For) (The Tower of Druaga / Babylonian Castle Saga)
• Bomberman (Brawler). His costume colors change depending on the Mii costume
• Travis Touchdown (No More Heroes) (Swordfighter)

Miscellany

• Presentation was shot in August, and may have significant differences from the final version.
• Amiibo of Banjo & Kazooie (who uses a Jiggy to stabilize the body), Terry, and Byleth are all planned for 2021. There isn’t a plan for one of the female Byleth, unsurprisingly given the lack of alternate new amiibo.
• To explain the crafting mechanics, Sakurai used a Minecraft toy that exploits the similar shape of the pickaxe and sword.
• Sakurai also reintroduced material that had been released in the 8.1 update, mainly the addition of Small Battlefield and online changes.
• Steve’s initial announcement on October 1 (which Nintendo has mostly taken off the internet) featured a shorter video by Sakurai. He discussed the difficulty in adapting Minecraft to Smash before announcing this video. That’s added below.

Videos

Wolfman’s Soapbox: So going into this, I had two major questions. The first was about how Steve’s moveset actually worked, something that wasn’t clear to me from their first trailer. And that was answered with one that’s incredibly weird but not really that insane (and again, emphasis on the “that”). The building part, which seemed the most confusing, isn’t that big a part of their moves, and everything else seems fairly clear. Obviously this is still an incredibly bizarre, complex character – and perhaps it’s fitting that a game as mammoth as Minecraft be the one to demand such a character – but it does seem not too difficult to get into using Steve’s abilities.

The second was about style. Minecraft’s ugly-pretty art style is weird, as are its characters’ blocky movement. I don’t think any kind of pushing it into the Smash house style would have worked at all (neither would giving Steve more realistic animation or features), but I did always have a concern about how that style would work next to the rest of Smash. And I think what makes it work is that there really isn’t that much of a change at all. I think the lighting makes Steve’s body a bit softer, but I think it works that there isn’t really as much of an attempt to “hide” the inherent difference. In that way, Steve’s a lot like Mr. Game & Watch (in how they stretch what the series can do visually) and Snake (in that they don’t really compromise much as guests). There’s an openness that I think works incredibly well. I’ve never found the style of Minecraft nice at all; it’s not visually offensive or unpleasant, just ugly and not for me. But I like it a lot in this context. It almost feels like Steve holds the art style of Smash together partially by not trying to hew to it even slightly.

In general, this presentation really worked, in that it sold me on a character for whom I have no fondness and whose design was never particularly appealing (the trailer helped a lot as well). There really aren’t many characters I actually “dislike” and I’ve always found Smash a great way to learn about series that are new to me, but it’s still nice to have that sense of feeling wrong in a positive way. Despite having spent years being deeply put off by both Travis Touchdown and the discourse surrounding him as a theoretical character, I think a costume is a very good place for him. Even the new amiibo look great, from Banjo’s Jiggy step to Byleth’s glowing sword. We probably should go for slightly shorter presentations next time, but presumably those would be for less insane fighters than Steve. As it is, this mixture of complexity and iconography and tangible size makes this a really nice jump back into Smash. Even if the new music’s a bit scanty.

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Wolfman_J

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