Poké Floats

Poké Floats
Universe	Pokémon
Appears in	Melee
Availability	Unlockable
Unlock criteria	Play 200 VS. matches.
Tracks available	Poké Floats
Tournament legality Melee Singles: Banned Doubles: Banned
Article on Bulbapedia	Poké Floats

Poké Floats (ポケモン亜空間, Pokémon Subspace) is a stage in Super Smash Bros. Melee. In All-Star mode, Jigglypuff and its teammates are fought here.

The Sudowoodo trophy is unlocked along this stage.

Stage layout

Similar to Rainbow Cruise, Poké Floats is an auto-scrolling stage with highly varied terrain. The match takes place on top of giant Pokémon floats (hence the name) which are in a constant cycle and whose movement, while deterministic, keeps getting harder to predict until the cycle is reset. Staying on a certain float too long will cause the player to lose a stock because the floats cross the blast lines after a while.

The floats, in order of appearance, are:

Pokémon	Picture	Behavior
Squirtle		The starting float. Starting from the middle of the screen, it slowly floats downwards until it disappears. Its head and arms act as solid platforms.
Onix		Appears when only Squirtle's head is still visible. Enters from the right, then starts slowly floating down along Squirtle. After Psyduck appears, Its whole body is a bumpy hard platform.
Psyduck		Its head rises upwards from the bottom left corner, pushing Onix upwards and tilting it diagonally. Afterwards, its whole body floats upwards until it disappears. Its head and bill act as solid platforms.
Chikorita		Enters from the left near the middle of the screen, then moves to the bottom-right quadrant (at which point Psyduck starts rising), hangs on the right side of the screen for a while, then drifts away. Its body (head included) is a hard platform, while its leaf is soft.
Weezing		Rises from the bottom of the screen, then gets progressively smaller (as if it is floating away to the background) until it crosses the upper blast line. Its heads form a single hard platform.
Slowpoke		Enters from the left side of the screen, slowly uncurls its tail, then disappears on the right. Its whole body is solid; its tail act as a wall and ceiling while curled.
Porygon		Three Porygon traverse the middle of the screen, right-to-left. Their bodies are completely solid.
Wooper		Quickly rises from the bottom-left corner to the middle of the screen, then moves to the right part of the screen. After Venusaur appears it moves to the left, then it floats above Venusaur and Seel until it disappears on the top-right corner of the screen. Its head is solid, while its gills act as soft platforms.
Sudowoodo		Slowly rises along the left side of the screen. Its right arm, despite being part of its model, never appears onscreen. Its head, head structure and leg act as hard platforms, while its arm and foot act as soft ones.
Snorlax		Rises from the bottom of the screen, remaining almost stationary until it gets pushed down by Venusaur's passage. Its head and body form a single solid platform.
Venusaur		Its head peeks from the right side of the screen; afterwards its whole body comes into view and traverses the screen right-to-left. Its body and stem are solid, while its leaves and petals act as soft platforms.
Seel		Traverses the screen right-to-left while slowly bobbing, directly following Venusaur. Its head, body and tail form a single solid platform.
Wobbuffet		Quickly peeks and retreats on the bottom-right, then reappears, floats completely into view and disappears again on the right. Its whole body is a single hard platform.
Unown		Shortly after Wobbuffet's appearance a line of several Unown starts slowly traversing the middle of the screen, from left to right. Shortly after Chansey appears, a second line traveling in the opposite direction starts moving above the first. They disappear completely at the end of the cycle. Their bodies all act as soft platforms.
Goldeen		Quickly jumps up from the bottom-left, then rises down almost offscreen. After two more quick jumps it disappears back down. Its tail and body form a single soft platform.
Lickitung		Appears from the left with its tongue outstretched, then floats to the right, retracts its tongue, and disappears on the right while extending its tongue again. Its body and tongue form a single hard platform.
Chansey		Peeks up from the bottom-left part of the screen, then from the bottom-right, then from the bottom-left and finally from the bottom-right before disappearing. Its head acts as a hard platform.
Geodude		Appears from the left side of the screen, hangs around the middle of the screen for a while and finally disappears on the right. Its body and arms act as a single hard platform.

After Geodude disappears, the last few Unown clear the screen and Squirtle quickly appears from the bottom, restarting the cycle. A full cycle takes about three minutes and a half.

All-floats glitch

This glitch can be performed only in version 1.0 of Melee, as a subset of the Name Entry Glitch. If a 0-Second Melee is started on this stage, all floats appears on the screen at the same time before the match ends (image courtesy of Andrewajt62), occasionally freezing the game. This glitch was discovered by Simna ibn Sind at the end of 2013.

Tournament legality

Poké Floats was originally deemed legal as a counterpick, on the basis that its movement was entirely deterministic and not fast enough to cause an overreliance on mobility, though some characters could have trouble recovering or going from float to float. Eventually, however, the stage was banned from tournament play due to the possibility of stage spikes, and recovery being made difficult by the odd movements and collision detection of some floats, as seen in this clip.

Origin

File:OnixPS.png

Onix, as seen in Pokémon Stadium. This is an example of how Poké Floats took its design of the "floats" from the character models in Pokémon Stadium.

This stage is not directly based on any Pokémon game, though its "Kanto Skies" designation refers to the Kanto region in which the original Game Boy Pokémon games and their remakes are set; rather, it is a collection of Pokémon models taken from the Pokémon Stadium series of games. The concept of "Poke Floats" was later reused in the WiFi chat rooms in Pokémon HeartGold and SoulSilver Versions.

Trivia

• This is the only non-Past stage in Melee that does not appear in Classic Mode. However, the music will appear when fighting Mewtwo.
• Despite its unlockable status, the song from this stage plays in Pikachu's section in the Special Movie, as well as being one of Pikachu's Credits themes.