Get ready
*AWESOME GAME THEORY THEME SONG*
Hello, Internet! Welcome to Game Theory.
Where the only way to play is Hanenbow Deku nuts only.
What's that? Final Destination, no items you say?
What are you? Casual?
Come at me internet! My Pichu will Smash Ball you up!
Seriously though, since I know some of you missed the sarcasm, we all know Hanenbow and Pichu were in different games
and that Pichu was like the second worst in the game.
He was all there for comedic effect.
Now Ganondorf? HA! He's the guy to watch out for.
#SarcasticOpeningParagraphIsSarcastic
But honestly Smash Bros. is a game after mine own heart, Internet.
Not because I have friends to play with, 'cause that certainly isn't the case.
*nervously laughs*
*SIGHS*
But because this game single-handedly settles more playground who-would-win-in-a-fight arguments
than that creepy old guy at the comic shop that smells of sadness and stale cheeto.
I mean come on!
Mario versus Link?
Samus versus Zelda?
Palutena versus Shulk?
Actually, scratch that last one.
And while each matchup is worthy of a theory in it's own right,
today I want to explore the story of these games.
Yes!
There's a hidden lore behind the smash series,
and for all the game's bright colors and light-hearted game play,
the secret story arc going in the background is actually incredibly somber.
Sad, even,
with each installment getting progressively darker.
So choose your character and set your stock to five,
'cause we're getting ready to take a LORE TOUR!
A LORE TOUR!
LOOOOORE TOUR!
At the end of classic mode in every Smash game lies a giant magical disembodied white glove, known as Master Hand.
Oh, sorry, I should've put up a SPOILER ALERT.
Ah, hopefully I didn't ruin anyone's fifteen minute gameplay session.
But you have to ask yourself this: why in a game full of Nintendo's biggest characters
is the final boss discount Glover here?
Did Mario's glove suddenly deside to revolt?
Why are you hitting yourself? Why are you hitting yourself? Why are you hitting yourself?
Could this be the result of a tech demo?
Does the last fight takes place in a magician's dressing room?
Eh, probably not.
No, the popular theory is that the characters in Smash are toys,
and that Master Hand is actually the hand of the kid who owns them.
The fights and adventures you go on throughout the games are just imaginary scenarios
this little Nintendo fan comes up with at play time.
Like the beginning of Toy Story 3 when Andy mixes all his toys together into one big game.
So let's take a look at the facts and see if this theory
Has any legs...uh, hands,
eugh, gloves to stand on.
The key piece of evidence is this game's opening cutscene.
Roll tape.
Right from the beginning, we see Master Hand grabbing lifeless characters out of a toy chest,
moving some stuff into position on his desk to make the environment and then,
with a snap of his fingers,
the whole scene springs to life like an Indian in the Cupboard. Cups and boxes
have magically transformed into a battle arena. Boom, pretty irrefutable evidence of the
theory that Smash takes place in the kid's imagination. But there's gotta be
something more here,
right? So let's get a little bit more specific by looking a bit closer at the
bedroom because it's important for understanding the overall story of the
franchise of games.
Notice the car on the wall making it likely our child is a boy.
The pencils meaning our child is old enough to write, the books meaning he's
also old enough to read, the toy box next to the bed meaning he's still young and
the fact that these toys are plush.
This is the bedroom of a tweenager to young teenager, probably 12 to 14.
Old enough to read and write and wants to play his own music but still with
plush toys next to his bed.
Remember this because we're going to be coming back to it later. By the time we
get to Super Smash Brothers Melee, our kid has grown up a bit.
He's now a bit older, we can actually see his arm for a split second as he grabs
Mario out of whatever weird
burlap sack thing he's floating in. But the floppy Nintendo dolls have been replaced
with more rigid and detailed trophies.
Could it be Nintendo subliminally priming us to buy more Amiibos?
Probably not, but I definitely want that Reggie Amiibo I saw floating around the other day.
My body is ready for that. But as we can see from his room, visible when we look
at all the trophies collected in the game,
our glove enthusiast young boy has grown into a serious gamer.
Look at all the systems in the back, but also notice how neat everything is, how
sparse it is.
I mean this certainly isn't an adult room but it also isn't a young kid's room.
More like someone in their upper teens or lower twenties. I swear I have the
exact same shelf from Ikea and I have the game consoles lined up exactly the same way.
This is someone growing up, maturing, and that's exactly what I think Melee's about.
And it all has to do with the introduction of Master Hand's weird evil twin
Crazy Hand. Crazy Hand doesn't move like Master Hand. Master Hand is elegant,
delicate, brutal, but deliberate like a deadly mime. Crazy Hand, on the other hand--
Haha! Joke of the year!
The award for best joke in a YouTube video goes to
Game Theory: hand, other hand joke.
Thank you, thank you, I couldn't have done it without you and bad puns.
Excuse me, sorry.
Crazy Hand, on the other hand, is erratic, unpredictable.
Look at his trophy description, "where Master Hand loves to create its alter
ego is impulsive and destructive consumed with that hollow feeling that
comes from destroying your own creations."
That's about as serious as Nintendo ever gets.
Master Hand is the spirit of imagination, the hand of a creator. Crazy Hand is the angry,
rebellious one that can't be controlled. The impulsive young adult wanting to
create a mess, play with those trophies, have something in those shelves
other than a sunflower and a cactus, maybe a dirty sock or something.
It's the battle every kid goes through as they grow up.
Fast forward to Super Smash Brothers Brawl and the mysterious holographic butterfly man Tabuu.
Brawl featured a single player campaign entitled the Subspace Emissary
whose plot was more complicated than Five Nights at Freddy's
which isn't all that surprising since Subspace Emissary was written by a guy who also wrote a
bunch of scenarios for Kingdom Hearts.
You gotta hand it to a team that's able to come up with as many creative titles
to avoid the 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 think they're
teaming up with master hand to turn all the characters back into trophies
forever so they could 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 the truth is he doesn't.
It's revealed at the end of the campaign that Master Hand was just being
used as a puppet controlled by an evil force called Tabuu.
Just in case you're not appreciating this wonderful metaphor let me explain:
taboo means something that's prohibited or restricted by social custom.
A lot of historical taboos have come and gone like women not being allowed to wear pants,
women not being allowed to have their bra's showing, women not being allowed
to keep their maiden names.
Wow, lot of these have to do with women, huh? You know what else is taboo and
gender neutral? Adults playing with toys. Kids are allowed to play with toys,
adults aren't. So, well, Master Hand,
our kid who's now grown into a young adult, may still want to play with his
toys, society, represented by Tabuu, is forcing him to stop. Even the way he looks, an
adult with arms crossed, closed off body language, indicates that this is the
serious side of adulthood and I gotta give props to counter the waffle for
pointing that one out in his own personal video.
Well spotted, man. Luckily in the end, Mario and the gang win and stand
triumphantly facing towards the future. The child we've watched grow up through
these past three games has accepted that these characters will forever be a part of his life.
A couple years ago this would have been the perfect ending to a wonderful
trilogy but then Super Smash Brothers for 3DS and WiiU came out and
Master Hand is still in it and Crazy Hand is still rolling around or whatever. But
unfortunately for us there's a new guy on the block. It gives us a whole new
level of insight into 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 is the most intense fight of the franchise.
Master Core takes on many forms from a giant person to swords to a monster to
a giant fortress to a dark clone of your character before finally just revealing
its true form to be a little ball within a ball with the smash brothers logo on it.
The symbol of the franchise and the fight ends on an incredibly somber note.
After all this intensity, the stage goes quiet,
and the ball just sits there and waits for you to finish it off.
It doesn't counter-attack and the only way that you can lose at this point is
if you don't knock it off the stage fast enough.
It's odd, eerie, it feels like an incredibly meaningful moment, but what exactly does it mean?
Well, first, let's look here. The fourth game isn't the first time that we've
seen Master Core. Look at it hiding beneath battlefield on Gamecube.
It's almost like it's some sort of ultimate creator, the driving creative force behind the entire franchise.
It's almost as if Master Core represents game director Masahiro Sakurai himself.
Now listen, I've written these things enough times to know that that seems
like a pretty big jump in logic but let me explain.
Think back to our kid who we've watched grow up over the course of these games.
That kid is Sakurai. The Super Smash Brothers franchise is his story.
Sakurai was born in 1970 meaning he was 13 with the Famicom first came out.
Remember this is the same age as the young boy depicted in the first Smash
game. That room from the first game was his room,
it was him growing up with Nintendo. Master Hand, the spirit of the creator,
obviously it's him, he's the one who figuratively brought these games to life
in his childhood bedroom and then literally brought these games to life as 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.
Don't believe me?
Sakurai created the character of Kirby at HAL Laboratories when he was 19.
Jeez, he created a character that changed gaming as a teenager.
Here I was just pretending to be a woman on stage. I guess we all have our own paths.
Anyway, Sakurai resigned from the company and the Kirby franchise years later because
he grew tired of the sequelization. This is a quote coming from two weeks after he resigned.
"It was tough for me to see that every time I made a new game, people
automatically assumed that a sequel was coming.
Even if it's a sequel, lots of people have to give their all to make a game
but some people think the sequel process happens naturally."
He wanted freedom then 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 headed the same way.
He wanted to destroy with one hand the thing he created with the other.
So then what about Brawl and Tabuu? This one is fairly obvious.
It's the pressure to grow up. Brawl is the story of Sakurai having to come to terms
with his chosen career path.
He makes video games, toys, for a living 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's symbolic of a person having to justify that, yes, he creates games and, no, not games like Call of Duty.
But then comes Master Core, and this is where things take a tragic turn.
You'll notice that master core breaks out of Master Hand. That's important.
It's Sakurai fighting to break free of his commitment to these games.
He's conflicted about being in control of the series, being the hand of the creator.
Does that seem like a stretch? It shouldn't! Think back to the quote I
mentioned a second ago. When Kirby became too sequelized
he left the company. He wanted freedom, he felt trapped, and now five installments into Smash,
he's feeling it again. He wants to break free but is understandably conflicted about it.
In a recent interview with Game Informer, Sakurai revealed that making
these games has been a massive undertaking and that the strain it puts
on him is way too much to bear. In it he says quote,
"You could say that all the effort in the past to stretch out,
keep pushing myself, and provide all these extra merits wound up tightening
the noose around my neck in the future. That may seem like it contradicts my
personal desire to keep giving gamers as much as I can but I don't see any easy answer for it.
And yet despite that I also have trouble picturing someone else taking my place."
Master Core represents this intense personal struggle.
Look at the way the core behaves. It bursts out of Master Hand, then puts up
one last ferocious fight, but then it knowingly gives itself over to us,
waiting there as a passive ball, waiting for you to end it.
It's sad, like a ferocious animal who fights getting caught but then gives up
once it knows it's lost.
Sakurai has spent decades of his life on these games. He's now 44 and for as much as he'd like to move on,
he knows this isn't the last installment. Melee and Brawl were both designed to be
the last in the series, but these days a successful franchise isn't about to end.
He knows that and he knows that for him, he's caught in a lose-lose scenario.
If he doesn't stay on board and hands over the franchise, he loses control over his personal creation.
He's no longer Master Hand, the symbol of these games. But if he stays, its more years of exhaustion,
blood, sweat, and tears poured into a game when he wants to do other things.
He'll fight certainly but in the end all you can do is give up and put it in the
hands of the player. The player in the game, and in real life, is one and only
the player can end it.
Ask anybody who works on a video game and they'll tell you what a personal
undertaking it is, how much of themselves goes into every single project they work on.
Smash is no different, even if it does just appear to be a simple crossover brawler.
And if you're surprised by the theory that Smash's big baddies might be
inspired by a real life person, then you'll be shocked by some of the other
game characters who've also had real life inspirations. Smash here to check
out my friend Matthew Santoro's new video on the subject where he lists off
a few more characters you might be surprised to have source material coming
from real life like Laura Croft. That was the one on this list that really got me.
I mean I'd like to meet that real-life inspiration, if you know what I'm saying.
But before you go check that one out, make sure you use your Master Hand to
click that subscribe button or click here to check out the rest of our
playlist of Nintendo theories. You clicked this video, so clearly you must like Nintendo.
So go click here and find out how Bullet Bill or the hook shot might be deadly,
how Link might already be dead, and how Mario may 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 do Hanenbow with Deku nuts only.
Pichu smashing it up.