I still don't understand Smash's 'health system' compared to other fighting games...not sure how one gets knocked out or shot of the screen based on your percentage...?
The percentage is your damage, the higher the number the farther and faster you fly away when hit. There's a box around the stage that determines when you get killed. You die when you cross that boundary, either from the top, either side, or falling to the bottom. It also means that when hit at higher percentages you will be unable to act for longer, leaving you more vulnerable to being comboed.
Imagine you want to learn how to drive a car from the start, with no experience at all. So you sit down in a car. Someone else sits next to you, points to the accelerator and says "Look, this is the accelerator! And this is the brake. And this is the steering wheel. That's the most important stuff you need to know. Congrats, you can drive a car now!" That's what Smash Ultimate does. Explaining the basics.
Smash does not teach you ANYTHING about decision-making.
If you actually want to learn something like driving a car or playing a game you need someone by your side to teach you WHAT you should do in a given situation, WHY you should do it, and why you should NOT do what you actually wanted to do.
And that's what game tutorials are for.
The issue with this is that there is no one answer to any situation and teaching those decision making skills badly will only make things worse for players.
To take, for instance, one relatively simple scenario that all players will find themselves in often, how do you respond to shield pressure, when you put up your shield and feel that you can't get out of it because your opponent is throwing out so many attacks? In Smash Ultimate you have effectively 4 scenarios, shield grab, roll, parry, attack out of shield. Each of these options has pros and cons that need to be considered (shield grab will lose to an attack and is slow in Ultimate but allows for a followup depending on how you throw them, roll can get you out of trouble but is easy to read and can be punished by a variety of options, parry is technically challenging and depending on the attack may not give you enough time to attack before your opponent, and using an attack out of shield depends heavily on what character you're using, how far away your opponent is, etc.). If you only teach one or two of those four things then you are leading players to a path towards failure and frustration, but teaching them all four before they are ready means they're going to drown in information overload and be unable to actually put what that tutorial teaches into practice. It's an extremely hard balance to hit, and given how many options are always at the player's disposal and the wide variety of differences between all 74 characters, it makes sense why they didn't go all the way with it. Knowing when to teach what and in what level of detail is something that is beyond the limits of what a tutorial alone can do.
That's not to say they can't do better though
