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