Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl‘s first tournaments are getting thrown together, and organizers have already decided that one of the game’s characters isn’t fit for competitive play. Michelangelo, one of the game’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reps, has been banned from one upcoming tournament thanks to one of the most outrageous moves in a fighting game at the moment.
Really excited to be helping with the $10k Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl tournament at @SuperSmashCon this weekend. Make sure you familiarize yourself with the rules!
– 3 stock / 6 minute
– 3 neutrals, 1 CP
– 1 ban, no DSR
– Michelangelo is banned
– Indefinite jab locks are banned pic.twitter.com/1FbBm9c0Sq— Michael Brancato (@NintendudeSSB) October 14, 2021
As a platform fighter, getting knocking players off stage is how players win. But, what if a character was able to avoid getting hit altogether? That’s what one of Michelangelo’s moves let him do. The move, his down special, is jump cancelable. Simply put, that means players can end the move at any time simply by jumping. Usually, that wouldn’t be a huge problem. What makes this move completely broken is that it can be jump canceled even when players don’t have any more jumps to use, essentially giving them infinite jumps.
With as many jumps as they want, players can avoid fighting completely by constantly jumping offstage and out of their opponent’s range. In a casual setting that doesn’t matter, but for the organizers running Super Smash Con’s Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl Tournament, which has a $10,000 prize pool, it’s a huge deal. As a result, Michelangelo has been banned from the tournament. For any fans of competitive Smash, this story should sound familiar to Meta Knight’s removal from Brawl tournaments. Thankfully, Michelangelo’s ban came quickly instead of years after the game’s launch.
A patch for the game has been released that addresses Michelangelo’s infinite jumps, although it hasn’t arrived on the game’s Switch version yet. And, naturally, the tournament is being run using Nintendo’s smaller console rather than much larger PlayStation or Xbox consoles.
