Talk:Counterattack
This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Counterattack article. It is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject. Comments such as "Mario is my favorite character" are not allowed and will be removed on sight. Please use the Mario Boards or our Discord server to talk about Counterattack.
If you do have a question or comment about the article, please remember to sign your edit with ~~~~.
Create "X Guard" articles to reduce the load on this page[edit]
|
This talk page or section has a conflict or question that must be answered. Please try to help and resolve the issue by leaving a comment. |
Counterattack is a rough page. Core mechanic of the series, across five games and two remakes. It has no sectioning to divide everything up, instead going with paragraphs and an order loosely resembling "overview, character specific counters / some game specific data, counterattack only battles, carrying downed bros and counterattacking". (Its not a great order, especially with carrying downed bros and counterattacking being at the back for inexplicable reasons.)
I think, of all things, Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam comes to the wiki's rescue. If you check Battle Guide, you'll notice some peculiarly named tips. "Jump Guard", "Hammer Guard", "Airplane Guard"... Give those tips a read for a moment, and you'll realize they're referring directly to Mario's, Luigi's, and Paper Mario's abilities to respond to enemy attacks. These are actually consistent among all three games that use the Battle Guide, with Jump Guard and Hammer Guard returning in Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga + Bowser's Minions and Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story + Bowser Jr.'s Journey. The latter even includes Punch Guard and Shell Guard for Bowser. (Jump Guard is rendered "jump guard" in Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga + Bowser's Minions and Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story + Bowser Jr.'s Journey, and technically Punch Guard and Shell Guard only appear as titles and not as running text, but hey, no one ever said Nintendo had to be perfect.)
I advise taking advantage of these names to relieve some of the load from poor Counterattack, making it easier to stucture and section the article (and properly handle the many, many counterattacks that don't fit under any of the given names.) I suggest implemented every named "Guard" as an article, and applying the coverage of said articles anachronistically. As in, a Hammer Guard article would cover counterattacks with Hammers from games before it was called a Hammer Guard. This results in the following articles:
- Jump guard (additionally pulls content from Jump)
- Hammer Guard (additionally pulls content from Hammer (move))
- Punch Guard (I would say it pulls content from Punch, but in practice there's no content to pull)
- Airplane Guard (I think this should cover the similar appearing Guard maneuver from Mario & Luigi: Dream Team, in spite of that game not having airplanes to begin with. Keeps everything better organized. I'm less sure if this should cover the variant where the player can move left and right, and I'm actually leaning toward excluding that due to being two steps removed from Airplane Guard rather than one.)
- Boomerang Guard
- Trampoline Guard
Additionally, Shell defense would be renamed Shell Guard. Every remaining Guard technique that doesn't fit one of these would be noted in game specific lists on this page but continue to mostly be handled on existing enemy and boss pages. (I realize Giant Battles exist and make this very annoying, since they are 90% unique Guard techniques, but I think the resulting system would work. I also acknowledge that Giant Luigi's defenses don't cleanly match Hammer Guard. For safety's sake, it's probably best to not group them with Hammer Guard.) Salmancer (talk) 21:34, March 23, 2026 (UTC)
