Tl;dr at the bottom paragraph
Wow. I couldn't bring myself to read all of the salty comments. I came into Zeus expecting neither an upgrade or downgrade. I think both could have been fine in their own right. I think both have the potential to be competitive. But a few things need to be made clear. Brawl Zeus, whether you like it or not, is in a sort of "uncanny valley" in terms of how finished it is. For some characters, I feel the changes made to them feel unique and have a great combination of PM mechanics and Minus unpredictability. Examples of this would be Mario, Yoshi, Peach, and Bowser. Some characters have few differences that can be considered new. Examples are Wario, Luigi, and Donkey Kong.
Then on the other side of the spectrum, there are the characters that seem finished, but lack tangible attacks that don't flow well together. Ex: Waluigi, Little Mac (does it always have to follow rule-of-three?). Finally, there are the characters that, to be blunt, have poorly constructed and poorly optimized move pools that range from either ineffective, to downright cheap. Ex: Ryu, Dark Pit, Pichu, Ness, Lucina.
The people in this thread have referenced ho Brawl Minus has too much silliness to have a viable competitive scene. For starters......no. Look, I've played a lot of mods. There was one custom mod called Project Omega. It was a collection of ultra powered characters with new stages, music, etc. The problems with it had to do with character balancing. A fourth of the cast was unchanged from Brawl Minus. Some characters were only changed to have infinite everything. MK could instantly cancel d-tilt into another d-tilt for rapid poking action! That was assuming you didn't just use a smash attack, some of which kill at 0%, making his other moves pointless. Then you have characters that are beyond SSS tier. There are about six or so characters that can not only cancel everything, but can move, attack and defend extremely quickly, jump forever (instead of ten times), have several screen nukes, unfair hitbox range, taunts that healed, you get the point. Brawl Minus is actually very balanced. I realize that there are some characters that struggle against others, but whatever one character can do, there is another one that can counter it.
There has also been talk of how Zeus aims to be a more competitive version of Minus. I don't doubt that! I don't have a problem with that goal. I would like to play Zeus as well as Minus. But the thing that holding it back, and you're going to disagree, is its image. Zeus attempts to take preexisting PSAs and Movesets and put it into their mod as their own. Some characters are changed slightly from someone else's so that it keeps them from looking like they just stole a character. Many of the sounds in the game aren't audible or are in places where they shouldn't be (Mewtwo CSS). Some stages make the framerate drop significantly and make the game feel choppier as a result. I showed this game to my older brother and we played Wily Castle. That level had rendering issues to the point where the fire effects on Roy's sword were gone and left nothing but a white plane. One match had my brother and I play MK (me) and Ryu (bro). He noticed he could just spam hadouken and it would be nearly impossible to counter. It couldn't be reflected back, it had a lot of knockback, and the transition from one hadouken to the next was quick and lagless. My brother became really bored because of how pointlessly easy Ryu was. All of these things make Zeus hard to approach. The shady practices, the inconsistent quality control, this is why Zeus isn't talked about as much. It's similar to another Brawl mod I played called Brawl Infinite. It had 100+ characters, dozens of stages, music and so on. But the brawl characters were unchanged, the new characters were either "stolen" or poorly made, and had issues up the ass. I tried playing it with my sister and she got bored really fast.
Zeus is trying to be a lot of things. It has sound effects reminiscent of Melee, mechanics like power shield reflecting, beloved stages made by other modders, and sometimes clever re-imagining of Minus and PM movesets. It cannot seem to find a particular need to satiate. Is it competitive? Yes. Is it silly? Sometimes. Is it a collection of mods with an added developers' creative twist? Occasionally. They may claim to have a goal, but the mod doesn't accurately show it. They want to show off what they have, but only a quarter is truly finished and another quarter is in a beta phase. It should have done what the Project M Dev Team did: develop a small cast first and then add on newer characters when the older ones are playable. Wario isn't very interesting in his "beta" stage and could have more work done on him, but the Zeus dev team feel they need to show off little mac instead even though he feels barely finished. This kinda problem also occurs in the PMCC "dev team" where they put Isaac and Sami in, but they are sooooo unfinished. They don't bother to fix them. They only focused on Knuckles and Lyn and then Isaac and Sami. They released Isaac when he wasn't even finished and instead of working on him, they put in another unfinished character. If a character isn't in a presentable beta, don't release it! Otherwise, you'll have Isaac who can die instantly with up-special, Sami who shits grenades, and character models that stretch across the entire screen, requiring one to exit the match. [links to Github pages discussing these issues are at the bottom of the page]
Zeus isn't perfect, but I know it can be better. If this game was only based on the really well made characters and the others would be added on later, I wouldn't have such an issue. However, it is also the image Zeus has that holds it back. So to conclude: a tl;dr.
Tl;dr As it stands currently, Minus is better made than Zeus. It has more potential to be competitive because of it's quality control and it doesn't rely on other peoples mods, but Zeus can do better if it works with what succeeds. When someone or some group I admire messes up, I want to help them know how to get better. But in some cases, I have to be blunt. And in those same cases, you can have people who praise their work as their magnum opus and act volatile towards harsh criticism (Sounds kinda like Melee, doesn't it?). I mean, I could have been truly honest and said that playing a couple hours of this game made me want to vomit and had to force myself to stop. Though that could have
possibly been a lack of sleep. I hope that both the Zeus team and Minus team understand where I'm coming from, learn from their mistakes, and stop bickering like a bunch of fucking kids. None of this "#ByeMinusHelloZeus" trolling bullshit.
Thanks for understanding,
--AGentleStar
References:
Sami Up-b forever:
https://github.com/Project-M-CC/Project-M-CC/issues/318
Isaac up-b issues:
https://github.com/Project-M-CC/Project-M-CC/issues/1
Isaac's shadow in flat zone:
https://github.com/Project-M-CC/Project-M-CC/issues/339
Isaac Pivot grab:
https://github.com/Project-M-CC/Project-M-CC/issues/128
Completing Sami:
https://github.com/Project-M-CC/Project-M-CC/issues/112
