Hello, and welcome to New Frame Plus,
a series about video game animation.
By overwhelming demand, you folks have voted
for the next Smash Bros character we talk about to be...
Mr Game & Watch.
And I can see why!
He’s weird.
Look at him. He's flat.
He’s basically just a silhouette.
His moves all have like three frames of animation...
No one else is like this.
How does this even WORK in a game like Smash, where pretty much every other character is
fully 3D and operating at a silky smooth 60 frames per second?
Let’s get into it, shall we?
Mr Game & Watch isn’t so much a character as an amalgamation.
A stand-in representing a whole series of games from the 80s.
Yes, before there was GameBoy, even before there was NES…
there was Game & Watch.
Game & Watch was this whole line of of handheld games that Nintendo produced
between 1980 and 1991.
Each one of these devices usually contained a single, very simple game
played on a liquid crystal display,
similar to that old CASIO watch you used to wear in middle school
(you... Cool Person).
But here’s the thing about LCDs:
you can’t really move the crystals in those displays around.
They can only be turned ON or OFF.
And that makes it pretty hard to animate…
...uh, anything.
But! Say you were to place those crystals in several different locations on the screen,
and then had them switch ON or OFF in response to the player’s button presses…
if you did that, it would almost SORT OF create the impression
of a character or object moving across the screen!
THIS is the origin for Mr Game & Watch’s weird movement style.
And they way it’s been implemented in Smash is actually pretty clever!
So in animation, we have this thing called “Key Poses”
(also sometimes referred to as “Extremes”, that's the more traditional animation term,
but in many cases they’re kind of interchangeable).
Anyway, Key Poses are the critical poses in an animation
which most clearly communicate the “story” of the action.
They’re the extreme points which define the path of motion.
Remember in that previous episode about Link’s attacks
where I highlighted these Windup, Attack and Follow-Through poses?
I would call all of these Key Poses (or Extremes) for Link’s basic attack.
Even without all the frames in between, these frames tell the story of what’s happening.
If you look at old school 8- or 16-bit sprite animation,
those game characters operated almost exclusively through key poses.
From Mario’s jump...
...to Simon’s whip...
...to Mega Man’s run,
all of these animations are built using just a handful of key poses,
the fewest poses possible to adequately portray the action.
If you look at Mr. Game & Watch in Smash, you’ll see that he also operates on Key Poses...
...kind of.
All his moves and attacks are, of course, derived from his whole library of handheld games,
but when you look at the character movement in those old games,
because of that old display technology,
there’s something... disjointed about it.
There are so few poses available and the characters cover so much distance at a time...
there's very little connective tissue between each new pose and position on screen,
so those characters tend to feel a little erratic in their movement as a result,
and none of their actions feel like they have any force behind them.
This presents an interesting problem for Smash:
how do you replicate that weird, choppy, slightly-disorienting quality of movement?
The first thing the animators have done here is use as few frames of animation as possible.
Mr. Game & Watch’s attacks are all constructed using maybe three poses, sometimes just two!
All his moves are built on key poses, just like those 8- and 16-bit characters I described before,
but it doesn’t feel like there are quite ENOUGH key poses in there to completely
sell the physicality of the actions he’s performing.
Old Game & Watch titles just could not take advantage of most of the animation principles
that we'd use to convey force or impact,
and Smash’s animators have actually preserved some of that effect
in not only the posing of Mr. Game & Watch’s moves,
but also the very even, flat timing of them!
You won’t see him actually SWING a chair.
He just holds the chair this way...
...and then he holds it THAT way.
And, for Mr. Game & Watch, that constitutes an attack.
This is a character that REALLY relies on Smash’s dust clouds and hit pauses and
effects explosions to get any sense of impact to his moves.
For any other character, that would be an animation problem.
But for Mr. Game & Watch, it is exactly that problem
that makes his moveset feel faithful to the source material.
But one of my favorite things about Mr. Game & Watch’s animation - and it’s the thing that I think
really makes this whole animation aesthetic work - is the way the animators have managed to
recreate the erratic, disorienting quality of his movement.
You can REALLY see this in his run.
Just for comparison, let’s look at Mega Man’s old run again...
It’s built from just three poses, but you can see how each one of those Key Poses
leads from one to the next.
Step-and-step-and-step-and-step...
You can see him putting one foot in front of the other,
you can see the nice up-and-down bob on his body with each stride...
Just three poses, but still enough to clearly communicate a run.
But with Mr. Game & Watch, and I LOVE this,
these poses barely communicate the action of running AT ALL.
NONE of these poses connect to each other in a logical way.
It’s like they took a bunch of individual run cycle poses,
and then they completely randomized what order they play in
so you’re left with an erratic jumble of poses that make no sense together.
That is really clever!
It’s not exactly how characters moved in the old Game & Watch days,
but it does sell the FEELING of how they moved in those games.
This brings us to the next question: how has Mr. Game & Watch’s animation
been adapted to work in Smash?
Well, there is one VERY BIG change, and you’ve probably already picked up on it.
In those old Game & Watch titles, like I mentioned before,
the crystals in those old LCD displays couldn't move.
So the characters couldn’t really “move” either.
They could only disappear and reappear in a new position simultaneously.
But that is not how Mr. Game & Watch moves in Smash. At all.
Sure, there might be a nice, stuttery pop to the way he switches between poses,
but his movement around the battlefield?
The tracking of his POSITION... is silky smooth.
See, limiting the visual information that Mr. Game & Watch’s posing conveys is one thing,
you can get away with that.
But his position on screen at any given moment?
No no.
Positional data is CRUCIAL to Smash Bros gameplay.
If Mr. Game & Watch popped around the screen in Smash the same way he did in his handheld games,
effectively teleporting around the stage nonstop,
he would be a nightmare to fight.
And to CONTROL, for that matter.
So, even though it defies the character’s source material,
for the sake of gameplay, Smash’s animators made the concession
of having Mr. Game & Watch’s position on screen update at a smooth 60 frames per second,
just like any other character on the roster.
And thank goodness for that.
This gets back to that same thing I was saying in the Mario episode:
animating a Smash character is all about finding the balance between
representing that character’s origins AND making them functionally work as a Smash fighter.
At the end of the day, that’s the big animation challenge for ALL of these characters.
And that had to be HARD with this guy, right?
Like, so much of what makes those old games distinct is their extremely limited animation.
You really CAN’T have Mr. Game & Watch move around like any other character and still FEEL like himself.
And I love that they found an elegant solution to that:
preserving the stiff, stuttery posing style of the source material,
while also being willing to make big concessions for sake of visual clarity.
His movement is still erratic and weird and it FEELS like it shouldn’t work,
but it totally does, because all the visual information you really NEED is in there.
Cool as heck, right?
Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this!
And let me know down in the comments if there are other characters you’d like me to dig into.
If you want to hear more about Smash animation,
here’s a playlist of all the characters I’ve covered so far.
Have a good one, and I’ll see you next time!