A small change can make a huge difference—and it looks like the new Smash Bros. has a tweak that'll definitely change the way the game plays.
CLASH Tournaments is calling this tweak "the rage effect." Basically, the way it works is, when a character is at a high percentage—that is, when they've taken more damage—that character's moves will also start doing more knockback against other players. This means that a character at 0% won't hit an enemy as hard as they would at, say, 60% (to pick a random higher percentage). Note that when I say "as hard," I'm not referring to damage dealt, but rather how far an enemy will fly after they've been hit.
You can see this in action in the video above—and sure enough, testing it out myself, it seemed that enemies soared farther when my character hit them at a higher percentage. This means that characters with lots of damage are somewhat deadlier than those without it. It's a change put in place presumably to balance things out, though it'll be interesting to see how this affects competitive play/just how fair this new mechanic is. Heck, it'll be interesting to see how this change affects characters like Lucario, whom already hit harder the more damage they have.
We'll update you on this when we have some more time with the game.
Note: we changed the headline from 'The worse you're doing in the new Smash Bros, the harder you'll hit' to the current headline, as we think the new headline reflects what is actually happening in the video better.
The Rage Effect in Super Smash Bros. for 3DS [CLASH Tournaments]