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 structure

Poké Floats is a stage similar to Rainbow Cruise, since both are naturally fixed-camera and scroll. Unlike in Rainbow Cruise, however, the background remains static. The fighting is on top of giant Pokémon floats (hence the name) which are in a constant cycle. Staying on a certain float too long will cause the player to lose a stock because the float goes behind the blast lines. A caution is that the floats tend to become harder to predict as the loop goes on, until it resets back to the first one.

List of floats in order of appearance

For a detailed description of each float's properties, see Debug menu (SSBM)/Stage data#Poké Floats.

• Squirtle (starting platform)
• Onix
• Psyduck
• Chikorita
• Weezing
• Slowpoke
• Porygon
• Wooper
• Sudowoodo
• Snorlax
• Venusaur
• Seel
• Wobbuffet
• Each letter of Unown, interspersed with the other floats until the level loops again
• Goldeen
• Lickitung
• Chansey
• Geodude

After Geodude, the last few Unown clear the screen just before resetting back to Squirtle, and the process starts again.

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.

While this stage does not directly come from a Pokémon game, the character models of the first generation Pokémon come from the models in the game Pokémon Stadium. The models for the second generation Pokémon come from Pokémon Stadium 2. The concept of "Poke Floats" was later reused in the WiFi chat rooms in Pokémon HeartGold and SoulSilver Versions. Kanto Skies comes from the Kanto region, which was explorable in the first games.

All-floats glitch

The all-floats glitch is a glitch found only in version 1.0 of Super Smash Bros. Melee. It is a subset of the Name Entry Glitch discovered by Simna ibn Sind at the end of 2013. The played must trigger the 0-Second Melee and select the Poké Floats stage for it. The match will start and end immediately as per 0-Second Melee, but the stage will load all of the Pokémon balloons on screen at once and will occasionally freeze the game.

• Example Animation courtesy of Andrewajt62

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.
• Due to the now-perceived extremely noncompetitive nature of this stage, as well as its past legality, Poké Floats is often brought up as a joke when discussing stages that could be unbanned in the current metagame, often in the form of the copypasta "LEGALIZE POKEFLOATS".