A party-fighter without ringouts? What nonsense is this? How the hell do you get points then, anyway? Well, PSASBR has come up with a rather elegant solution in its efforts to stray from the mold and come up with its own brand of play style.
Supers.
That's the (first) major distinction between PSASBR and the Smash Bros. games. When it was first announced, I was skeptical. My friends were skeptical. Hell, a good portion of the internet is still iffy about the concept. It's understandable, but you have to make the leap and give the game a go before judging it fairly. First of all, it's very different from Smash Bros. - unexpectedly so. The lack of a "health" system means that there is no immediate feedback as a match nears a mid or endgame stage.
In Smash Bros., the accumulation of damage is immediately apparent. Not only is the damage percentage shown openly, but a player with high damage also tends to fly further away from the stage, meaning the gameplay itself shifts as a player nears death. It's simple, it's streamlined. The players are given a direct visual representation of the endgame (at least so far as that life goes).
In contrast, PSASBR's system causes players to be more mindful of how much meter the opponent has built up. This isn't to say one system is more "intelligent" than the other, but it's a distinction in style and representation of gameplay. For instance, while you can't heal in the middle of a Smash Bros. match during tournaments (with the assumption that items are off), PSASBR allows you to "reverse" the game state through throws. A throw in PSASBR ejects AP (basically your meter) in the form of these physical orbs that you can then collect. How much your opponent loses depends on the amount s/he had in the first place. The more meter one had before being thrown, the more is lost. There's no doubt that throws are insanely powerful. To compensate for that, throws are also quite limited in range - and easily punishable if avoided.
Each character has 3 distinct levels of supers. It's easy to think of them as scaled by level. Level 1 is generally local scale, or single target under normal circumstances. Level 2 is large scale - generally designed to take out most opponents on screen. Level 3 supers are either sure-kill (wipes the screen of all enemies once), Modal (the character enters an awakened "state," gaining the ability to kill with any hit) or are screen clearing FPS-like sequences, much like Snake's final smash in Super Smash Bros. Brawl. While this is a general summary of the different levels of supers, not all characters necessarily adhere to these criteria, and may have a unique super that can't be categorized among the others.
Supers, besides being the only kill-method in the game, also have the ability to control the flow of gameplay. Not all characters have the ability to combo into a guaranteed super, and thus the ones able to are very powerful in 1v1 settings. In an effort to balance this, the characters without the ability to combo into a super tend to have very useful level 3 supers that can net at least 2 kills per activation.
While any fighting game has an opening, midgame and endgame to be aware of, PSASBR's neutral game changes greatly once a player gains meter enough for a kill. In Smash, the gameplay shifts to kill/survive mentality once a player is on the verge of losing a life. The system compliments this by physically sending a near-death player further and further from the stage with each hit, creating a sort of endgame "state" of play. As far as PSASBR goes, the change in gameplay is entirely dependent on how the players choose to react to the opponent's meter and potential to kill. It doesn't necessarily make for a crowd pleasing element, the subtlety seems to be overlooked by many players when they see PSASBR and assume the only thing different Smash is that there are supers and natural combos. Well, that's if for the basics on meter and how it sets PSASBR apart from the Smash Bros. series. I hope this educates and encourages anyone stuck on the fence about PSASBR to go and try it out.
