Metagame Documentary thoughts
After the cut!
So I have to start out by saying I’m really enjoying the new documentary by Samox. We’ve all been anticipating it for years and I honestly am only into competitive Smash at all because of the first documentary, The Smash Brothers.
As of this writing, episodes 7 and 8 have yet to debut, so this might be an incomplete analysis; but seeing as though it appears that the climax of the story being told is Apex 2015, I feel as though I have seen enough to get a feeling for how the documentary is coming together. I think that the way the stories were told in the first documentary was a bit more focused. It’s partly due to how each episode of The Smash Brothers was devoted to specific players, but also because each of those players got essentially the same amount of spotlight. Korean DJ got a little less because his Smash career was shorter, and Mango got a little more because of the inclusion of EVO 2013′s whole story. But Metagame feels unevenly spread. We have tons about Mango, tons about Armada (which is understandable since the initial plan for this documentary was to tell his story), and a lot of psychology from PPMD. But Mew2King is pretty anonymous, which is at least slightly understandable since he had his own episode in the first documentary, but so did Mango and he has the spotlight in Metagame. And on top of that, Hungrybox feels really left out as well.
I’m still really pumped for the last two episodes and this would be an insta-buy on DVD or something, as would the first one, but I think the more episodic focus of The Smash Brothers was able to form a more effective, bite-sized narrative. Metagame’s story is there, but it feels slower and less focused. Maybe I was expecting something more along the lines of the first documentary, where each episode focused on a specific player, while this one is more of a timeline of just what happened year by year. It’s cool to see how one god dominated or struggled against another, but I didn’t feel like there was as much tension until Leffen came along.
