NTSC
Within the video game community, NTSC is a term used to refer to the region of North America, parts of South America, and small parts of Asia. The term comes from the analog television encoding system National Television System Committee, the primary method of encoding analog TV for North America, South America, and some parts of Asia (including Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines). This is opposed to PAL, which is the standard used in Europe, Australia, Africa, most of Asia, and more than half of South America.
There are numerous differences between NTSC and PAL as television formats, but the main difference which affected video games was their refresh rates. NTSC TVs run at 60 hertz (meaning the image refreshes 60 times per second), while PAL TVs only run at 50 hertz (50 refreshes per second), meaning that, unless adjusted to account for the refresh rate, PAL runs at 5/6th the speed of NTSC. An alternative standard that runs PAL at 60 hertz was later developed, so the difference between the formats primarily became their different methods of encoding.
However, the Japanese NTSC encoding (referred to colloquially as NTSC-J) is slightly different than the international NTSC coding, so there are generally minor differences between the two. Due to this, NTSC is most commonly used as shorthand for all NTSC based regions, but NTSC-U is used for "the North American version of a game", while NTSC-J is used for "the Japanese version of a game" (although NTSC-J is technically also used in some other east Asian countries, such as South Korea and Taiwan). Historically, North America is usually the second region for games made in Japan to be released; compared to the many European languages that require their own translations, fewer translations are necessary for the greater NTSC market (English at least, with French, Spanish, and German being the most common secondary translations). As a result, NTSC-U releases are often the second version of Nintendo games, with potential major bugs fixed and possibly minor changes added.
In the context of competitive Super Smash Bros., the region which is standard for competitive play depends on the game, and difficulties can arise because of this. From Brawl onwards, whatever region is played depends on the country that is running the tournament, as all regions are the same gameplay-wise. For Smash 64, the NTSC-J version is played in Japan, while in North America and even PAL regions, the NTSC-U version is typically played. Both versions have numerous differences to mechanics and character balance. The PAL versions also have changes to character balance, and while they were typically played in Europe and Australia originally, those regions have adopted the NTSC-U version in more recent years. For Melee, the NTSC versions are used globally, with the NTSC-U and J versions being identical gameplay-wise. Europe and Australia did use the PAL version for quite a long time, which had numerous balance changes, but in more recent years, those regions have adopted the NTSC version.
Summary of NTSC releases of the Super Smash Bros. series[edit]
Super Smash Bros.[edit]
The original Super Smash Bros.'s NTSC-U release contains a lot of gameplay changes from its NTSC-J counterpart. Several changes were made to mechanics and every character. Some characters, like Link and Ness, were noticeably nerfed from their Japanese counterparts, while others, like Yoshi and Jigglypuff were noticeably buffed. As mentioned earlier, the NTSC-J version is played in Japan, whereas the NTSC-U version is played in other regions.
Super Smash Bros. Melee[edit]
Aside from minute aesthetic differences, there is effectively no difference at all between the NTSC versions of Melee, with every version even having both English and Japanese as language options. North America and Japan received the same revisions between versions 1.0, 1.01, and 1.02, while other NTSC regions (such as South Korea) only received version 1.02, which is the standard in tournaments. The Korean NTSC-J version is completely identical to the North American NTSC 1.02 ROM, but is encoded for NTSC-J consoles.
Super Smash Bros. Brawl[edit]
In order for cross-region online play to be possible, the only differences between versions of Brawl are purely aesthetic or linguistic, though they are still encoded differently. The game has three regional NTSC versions, corresponding to the North American, Japanese and Korean Wii console regions: NTSC-U (English only), NTSC-J (Japanese only) and NTSC-K (Korean only).
Super Smash Bros. 4 / Super Smash Bros. Ultimate[edit]
Neither of the two versions of SSB4 nor Ultimate use analog connections (although the Wii U console is compatible with native analog connections). As such, the North American versions of these games only have linguistic and aesthetic differences from their original Japanese counterparts, similarly to Brawl.
As Nintendo Switch is region-free (with the sole exception of consoles and game cards released in mainland China), Ultimate essentially only has one single version for all regions, with all of its linguistic and regional differences built entirely into the game's sole ROM.
