YMMV / Smash Bros. Lawl

• Adaptation Displacement: You'll see more active fans of spin-offs of Lawl (like Lawl Beatdown or Lawl NOVA) despite the original one's longer presence. Due to many year-spanning hiatus beginning from 2014 onwards and the author focusing his attention more with The Frollo Show, the medium of Smash Bros Lawl is generally better known for its multitude of fanmade spin-off videos than the original one, given how active the fandom is making moveset videos.
• Awesomeness Withdrawal: Lawl's infrequent uploads made it very prone to this, with its high quality videos coming up less and less by each year, often with year-long hiatus, with most fans resorting to binging the old videos while waiting for new ones to come out.
• Awesome Music: A lot of the chosen songs for the stages and moveset videos are nice. Brawl's good music is present as well.
• Badass Decay:
  • When Irate Gamer first appears in Subspace Mode, he trophies AVGN, effortlessly dodges a bullet from the Nostalgia Critic, and summons the Game Genie to trophy the Nostalgia Critic as a bonus, much to his shock. In his next appearance, he is shown running for his life and pleading for assistance from Ganondorf.
  • Carlos Trejo had a pretty badass debut both in his moveset and level. His role became more "loser" when his hatedom rose.
• Broken Base: Villains Valley. My god, Villains Valley. For fans of The Frollo Show it was well-received. Lawl fans on the other hand absolutely hated it. Not only was the sudden inclusion of gore and Frollo Show esque Mind Screw out of place, it also exploited serious real life controversies of the real Doug Walker making several people uncomfortable. It was not helped by the fact many of Chin's fans proceeded to attack and insult the critical fans and ignoring their very reasonable criticism. This split became even more divided after Chin uploaded a video in April 2024 making fun of people who critiqued Villains Valley, with many of his longtime fans feeling betrayed and permanently unsubscribing from him, while his less critical fans got even more vitriolic.
• Character Tiers: It has them, though unlike most examples, they're based on theorycrafting and observing what's going on in the videos.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Best Hercules was the most voted character in the 1 on 1 voting ^note A fighter from a source material almost completely obscure outside of Lawl, followed by J Jonah Jameson, Irate Gamer, Nostalgia Critic and Frollo.
    • The Nostalgia Critic and Jameson are the most noticeable examples since the former rarely appeared in videos at the time, and the latter was the latest newcomer at the moment.
    • And as it turns out, Frollo and the Nostalgia Critic were the most voted characters, both voted as the characters fighting one another in the first ever true 1 VS 1.
  • Another poll was taken to decide whose Classic Mode should be shown next, with the winner being Ib.
    • Also as a bonus round, a poll on YouTube was made to decide Ib's partner in a team battle for her classic mode (though the point of the polls weren't revealed until the last vote). The King won.
• Fanfic Fuel: Given the formulaic format of the videos, Lawl itself became a very easy format to make fanmade videos for, given it easily allowed for any fan to put their favorite character from any medium into Smash Bros, so it's no wonder many fans took it to themselves to make their own versions of Lawl.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Ib's moveset would be such if used in an actual game since it gives the player an absurd amount of field control. Chincherrinas even implemented a Nerf in the video description based on one of the comments he received to delay the painting effects.
  • The Nostalgia Critic was a similar case in his debut, but this has lessened significantly in the video where he fights Frollo. He even had his Final Smash changed to one with more limited range (Critical Rage, similar to Marth's Critical Hit).
  • Yomika is a pretty notable example as well, having attacks that can be spammed over and over again to heavily nullify other opponents' strategies. In response to this, she was given multiple nerfs in the Lawl fangame.
• Heartwarming Moments: Nicholas Cage protecting Aya from I.M Meen at the end of Aya's moveset video.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Several things happened in Smash Bros Lawl before the original Super Smash Bros games.
    • Bison, Guile, and Dr. Wily were included in Lawl before the protagonists of their series joined Smash.
    • Don Ramón's side special featured a move allowing you to steal away an enemy projectile to throw it as an item, which works similarly to how Villager's Pocket works in the 4th game.
    • The fourth subspace level (Madotsuki's dream) has a Tommy Wiseau whose alternate color changes his name, this was before Super Smash Bros 4, which introduced alternate characters as costumes which also changed their names (Alph and the Koopalings).
    • Guile and Dr. Wily became assist trophies in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, years after their Lawl movesets.
    • Jaime Maussan's final smash changes the current stage mid-battle, Super Smash Bros Ultimate later introduced the "Stage Morph" option which allows players to fight on two differents stage which swaps mid-battle.
    • While there is a few differences, the Mr. Six assist trophy consist of trapping opponents in his bus and leaving the stage to KO them, just like the Kapp'n assist trophy would later do in Super Smash Bros Ultimate.
    • A commonly used gimmick in earlier spin-off movesets was for a move to be usable Once Per Stock or moves only lasting a certain amount of times. Banjo in Ultimate would feature such a gimmick for his Side B, becoming useless after 5 uses.
    • With Panty & Stocking being the most well known tag-team of Lawl, Pyra and Mythra's reintroduction of the technique led chincherrinas to make an edit based on it, (though lore-wise they're still both the same person like Zelda/Sheik rather than separate characters like the two angels).
  • Codec Snake's moveset intro starts with him leaving a bus filled with characters from The Frollo Show that aren't in the Lawl roster, which includes Mephiles and Fegelein. Years later, the latter two ended up actually joining the Lawl roster by fans' demands.
  • One of the earlier spin-offs was called Lawl Ultimate, named after one of the popular fan-names for Smash 4. It was notorious for its poorly explained movesets and editing, which became a huge in-joke in the community for years thanks its So Bad, It's Good status and its status as one of the worse Lawl spin-offs. Come Super Smash Bros. Ultimate's reveal using the same suffix as this spin-off, and the jokes wrote themselves.
  • Madotsuki's Balcony showing up tacked on to the end of the Real City level in Subspace Emissary was always hilariously out of place, with this sprited building standing nearby a realistic live-action city. Then come the dumped 0.04 beta of Yume Nikki resurfacing in 2021, we can actually see a reflection of the city around Madotsuki's balcony. And what do we see? A realistic live-action city.◊
• Memetic Mutation: Despite coming from one of the earlier spin-offs, Angry Joe's moveset saw a resurgence in popularity thanks SiIvaGunner using it as one of their rips, thanks in part to its So Bad, It's Good quality and turning Angry Joe into a semi-recurring character.
• More Popular Spin Off: A few fanmade movesets are so popular that some of their fans aren't even aware of the original Smash Bros Lawl existence.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Ib's Final Smash, unsurprisingly given the original version of it is still one of the most frightening scenes of the game. Every player has to see the stage darken as a giant creepy doll looms slowly from a portrait, with foreboding bells with each crawl, and once time runs out to find the exit, everyone dies.
  • Madotsuki's and Yomika too, with the player slowly pulled in by Kyuukyuukun's passage in complete silence in Mado's case, and the Stomach Overlord sending lots of staring eyes at players, cursing one of them to hell, in Yomi's case.
  • Trejo may be the least liked character, but both his victory music and his character icon (based on the cover of his book, Cañitas)◊ are both as creepy as expected from a ghost hunter.
  • The Nostalgia Critic's new Final Smash has him snapping and violently beating on his opponent with a crowbar, complete with shots of the unfortunate opponent's bloodied, battered face.
  • Aya and Mary's defeat animations where they DIE. It's even creepier if the winner's animation has them laughing.
  • World Taste, the stage based on Wilford's Lair from The Frollo Show, borders on this and Nausea Fuel, given the nightmarish images of realistic body parts making up the stage's platforms.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: The Irate Gamer. In a Facebook post, Chincherrinas listed him as his favorite Classic Era character, and stated he was proud that he made him a more likable character. Several fans went from hating the guy to seeing him as So Bad, It's Good because of Lawl.
• Seasonal Rot: Later eras from Lawl had quite the mixed feedback compared to the near-universal praise this series had in its heyday, with most of the entries of videos post-2015 being criticized for increasingly gimmicky movesets, and a strange animation style much different to the one used in 2012-2013. The last moveset video (Pyron) outright refused to have any lore in the Intro and Outro segments, likely foreshadowing that Lawl wouldn't be living much further.
• The Scrappy: Carlos Trejo is a character that hasn't been too well received by the fans. Of course, this hasn't gone unnoticed by Chincherrinas, as he gives Carlos his own rank in popularity (the lowest one possible) and puts him at the bottom of the roster screen with nobody next to him. Considering his Small Name, Big Ego status has been played from the beginning, it's likely he wasn't meant to be likeable to start with.
• So Bad, It Was Better: During the fallout of Villain’s Valley, some commenters commented they felt the video’s editing was too smooth compared to older videos, and stated this caused an uncanny effect for them.
• Special Effects Failure:
  • Back when they were released, the first four moveset videos looked impressive. Nowadays... well, it's best to say that Chincherrinas is a lot better at video editing now than he was in the past.
  • The animation style for the later Lawl videos opted to go for a more tweening-based approach, making movements feel far floatier with less momentum compared to the old videos.
• Tear Jerker:
  • Nostalgia Critic, Tommy Wiseau, and Madotsuki mourning their individual losses ^note NC mourns over the loss of his frenemy AVGN, Wiseau mourns over the loss of the city he had many fond memories of, and Mado recounting how she was rescued by NC, while she willingly submitted herself to a Subspace Bomb, as an act of genuine caring for her is actually a little sad. The background music helps.
  • If Aya loses a match, she dies from blood loss.
  • Also, if Mary loses a match, she burns into a pile of ashes.
  • In Villains Valley, Nostalgia Critic gets a Mind Rape from a syringe as he remembers all the failings out he had over his career, prompting him to inject the contents of the syringe after it tells him to embrace the real him, transforming him into Doug. Try as much as they could, they can't get him to snap out of it before he heads over to a screening of Demo Reel and getting a further Mind Rape where he sees Linkara, Angry Joe, and Phelous fade away as he's left to mourn to himself (and Guru Larry). This hits especially hard if you were a Channel Awesome fan during the early part of The New '10s.
• That One Boss: This is not a real game, but the way some bosses in Subspace Mode are presented give the impression of difficult bosses.
  • Game Genie appears to be this. He's only vulnerable without his ghostly tail, which disappears at random, whenever he's not using powerful explosion attacks. Even when he is vulnerable, he's trying to wallop you. And he's one of the first fights of the very second level.
  • Big Red. If he swallows you, it's an instant KO, but his open mouth takes up most of where you can hit him. He also has an attack where he tries to knock you closer to his mouth.
  • The Persian Messenger is always zipping across the screen. It's hard to see him coming, and you take damage for being in the way. He appears to only be vulnerable when he stops so that his horse may neigh, but this is a short window of opportunity that takes an amount of time to happen again.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: The long awaited Villains Valley hasn't been very warmly received by longtime fans due to taking several steps into Darker and Edgier territory more akin to that of The Frollo Show, delving more into that series' usual Body Horror and realistic violence that Lawl mostly stuck away from. With almost every cutscene relying more on showing the characters' breakdowns and sufferings than advancing the plot or leading to gameplay, emphasizing much more on Doug Walker's more controversial outings in Real Life. Many longtime fans were bummed out of Subspace Emissary changing focus in favor of the already alienating direction that later episodes of The Frollo Show took. Eventually the reception towards the Ronald Monks' storyline caused chincherrinas to drop the story mode in November 30th, 2023.
• Unexpected Character: Many character choices seem to come out of left field, although some are due to Author Appeal.
• The Woobie: Madotsuki, judging by her back story on her trophy. And in the end of her classic mode, her wish is implied to be The staircase next to her balcony, seen at the end of Yume Nikki

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