Review
Super Smash Bros. Brawl (Wii)
Super Smash Bros. was the biggest thing that kept Nintendo competitive in the last generation. In other words, it was Nintendo's Halo. The first Smash Bros. seemingly came out of nowhere with its release in 1999 and quickly became a fan favorite. Enough of one, at least, to warrant pushing the sequel's production hard enough to not only double the playable roster and massively revamp the visuals, but to also be a near-launch title for the GameCube merely two years later. It's been seven years since then, and the third installment has finally shown its face.
Before I say anything else, I will say this: The game is fantastic and it deserves its popularity. Just like its predecessors, multiplayer in Super Smash Bros. Brawl is frantic, fast paced, and accessible at all different skill levels, so long as you're playing with others of similar skill. That much hasn't changed. So what has changed? What makes Brawl a better game than Melee? Or for that matter, what makes it worse? Is the game a step forward, backward, or sideways?
The easiest way to answer this question is to look at both the quantity and quality of playable characters in Brawl. No one (that I've encountered) has called for any major changes in the general gameplay of the series - what most seem to want is a higher number of quality fighters to chose from. In order to expand the playable roster from Super Smash Bros. by such a dramatic number in such a short amount of development time, many of the characters in Melee were "clones," meaning that two or more characters would play very similarly – most would say too similarly. Many characters shared nearly identical move sets, giving you little reason to chose one from the other. Brawl adds a significant amount of newfighters to the list, while simultaneously minimizing the problem of clones. Some clones - like Pichu, Roy, and Dr. Mario – were thrown out of the game entirely and replaced with brawlers more distinct in nature from other fighters. Captain Olimar, Pokémon Trainer, Sonic and others all play like no other characters. Even additions such as Wolf and Ike who seem like they would play like existing characters have different enough move sets for them to not feel like clones. Other fighters who were previously clones remain, but the differences between those characters have been widened as well. Young Link (now Toon Link) and Link now feel much different than they did in Melee, for example. Toon Link feels lighter than Young Link did and seems to move faster. Link, on the other hand, seems to be a bit more powerful than he used to be, but also moves more slowly. Slight variations like these from Melee are all over the place in Brawl, much in the same way as changes like these were made from the original Smash Bros. to Melee.
In the original Smash Bros on the 64, things were fairly primitive. Most of the game focused on the hard hitting smashes themselves. Land a few good, hard hits, and it's over for your opponent. When Melee came out it improved on that with the expanded move sets and more emphasis on racking up damage before the harder hitting moves really spelled inevitable destruction for the one being hit. Maneuvering your character also became more important - dodging, catching thrown items, deflecting attacks and things of this sort became necessities to master. Brawl takes it a step further by adding even more "pokes" of this sort, and making some hard hitting moves less effective without a lot of accumulated damage. That's not to say that the hard hits and hard hitters don't exist anymore, because of course they do, but Brawl certainly makes you earn your kills more than ever before. In this way Brawl is the most balanced game in the series.
The difference in the feel of the play may be somewhat disheartening at first, perhaps even disappointing to those expecting to pick up Brawl and be just as good as they were in Melee right away. Luckily most of the learning seems to come quickly for most, much like it did when switching from the N64 version of Smash to Melee. A few hours of solid play and the feel of the game grows on you and eventually becomes second nature again.
Massive attempts have been made to revamp the single player experience in Brawl as compared to Melee. Subspace Emissary, a fairly lengthy story type mode, has been added, and the modes from Melee return as well. The results of the revamp are somewhat mixed. While there is more to do playing single player in Brawl as opposed to the older two games, and while what there is to do is much better than the predecessors, Smash Bros. simply doesn't hold its charm in the single player arena. Don't kid yourself if you think you're going to have as much fun playing single player as you do multiplayer. You won't. That is unless you're crazy. Personally, the most entertaining part of single player remains the Event Matches, and even then I seem to care much less about them this time around as compared to Melee. The meat of this game is its multiplayer. It always has been, and nothing changes here. I really can't even recommend this game to anyone who doesn't have someone else to play with. A great addition to the single player is the ability to create custom levels, but of course this addition benefits the multiplayer far more than the single player.
Which brings us to our next topic of discussion: online play. The good news is... Brawl has it! And that's about when the good news ends. Nintendo continues their tyranny of separate friend codes for each game, making adding friends and playing with them far more of a hassle than it should be. Additionally, online "play anyone" matches have so far been pretty horrible with lag, constant disconnects and trouble finding opponents. Perhaps this will improve over time, perhaps not. We can only hope that it does. Friend matches fare somewhat better but are still far from perfect in terms of lag. Frankly it's downright pathetic how far behind Nintendo is with online play when compared to every other major console. Brawl could have been the Wii's flagship online title, but instead the experience has so far fallen somewhat below the status of "adequate." On the brighter side of online Brawl, watching and betting coins (earned throughout the game to be used to unlock additional trophies and the like) on previously recorded internet battles is surprisingly entertaining. I imagine many drunk nerds have already created drinking games based on the mode. Additionally, the feature to have custom user made levels automatically downloaded to your system every day is a great idea, and makes for new multiplayer experiences every day, if you so like. They may even inspire you with ideas of your next custom level.
If you like playing with items, there are tons to choose from in Brawl, including the much discussed Smash Ball. For those not in the know the Smash Ball is an item that appears randomly and floats around the level waiting to be beat open by players. The first one to beat the item open then gains the ability to unleash a ridiculously powered attack, often killing one or more of the other players in one move, keeping true to its namesake of "Final Smash." Final Smashes are fun diversions, but quickly grow old and are very imbalanced. Some moves are fairly easy to avoid and don't punish nearly as harshly as others do. Others are literally unavoidable and kill you no matter what. In addition to Smash Balls (heh), assist trophies have also been added into the mix. Assist Trophies are much like Pokeballs, in that you pick up the item and then a secondary character comes to the playing field to help you out. With assist trophies, though, your helper could be one of many Nintendo characters, instead of just a Pokemon. Additions like these were obvious attempts at making items more important to the game as a whole than they were in the previous two games. And they do affect the game more, that is if you keep those items on. I've found them to generally be pretty annoying and most people seem to prefer just keeping them off.
Much is to be said about the control in Brawl. As you likely already know, you have the ability to play brawl in many different ways: with a Wii remote, a Wii remote+nunchuck, the Classic Controller, or the traditional GameCube controller. I assume most people will be sticking with the latter, simply because it is what everyone is used to. The remote by itself is awkward, the remote with the nunchuck is surprisingly okay, and the Classic Controller would be fine if it was a more comfortable controller use in general. Whatever you like, you have your choice. A nice feature that utilizes the memory in the Wii remote is the ability to load your user name onto your remote and take it with you. That means no matter where you brawl your stats can be updated, if you care enough to load your profile back and forth from your controller.
Before I say anything else, I will say this: The game is fantastic and it deserves its popularity. Just like its predecessors, multiplayer in Super Smash Bros. Brawl is frantic, fast paced, and accessible at all different skill levels, so long as you're playing with others of similar skill. That much hasn't changed. So what has changed? What makes Brawl a better game than Melee? Or for that matter, what makes it worse? Is the game a step forward, backward, or sideways?
The easiest way to answer this question is to look at both the quantity and quality of playable characters in Brawl. No one (that I've encountered) has called for any major changes in the general gameplay of the series - what most seem to want is a higher number of quality fighters to chose from. In order to expand the playable roster from Super Smash Bros. by such a dramatic number in such a short amount of development time, many of the characters in Melee were "clones," meaning that two or more characters would play very similarly – most would say too similarly. Many characters shared nearly identical move sets, giving you little reason to chose one from the other. Brawl adds a significant amount of newfighters to the list, while simultaneously minimizing the problem of clones. Some clones - like Pichu, Roy, and Dr. Mario – were thrown out of the game entirely and replaced with brawlers more distinct in nature from other fighters. Captain Olimar, Pokémon Trainer, Sonic and others all play like no other characters. Even additions such as Wolf and Ike who seem like they would play like existing characters have different enough move sets for them to not feel like clones. Other fighters who were previously clones remain, but the differences between those characters have been widened as well. Young Link (now Toon Link) and Link now feel much different than they did in Melee, for example. Toon Link feels lighter than Young Link did and seems to move faster. Link, on the other hand, seems to be a bit more powerful than he used to be, but also moves more slowly. Slight variations like these from Melee are all over the place in Brawl, much in the same way as changes like these were made from the original Smash Bros. to Melee.
In the original Smash Bros on the 64, things were fairly primitive. Most of the game focused on the hard hitting smashes themselves. Land a few good, hard hits, and it's over for your opponent. When Melee came out it improved on that with the expanded move sets and more emphasis on racking up damage before the harder hitting moves really spelled inevitable destruction for the one being hit. Maneuvering your character also became more important - dodging, catching thrown items, deflecting attacks and things of this sort became necessities to master. Brawl takes it a step further by adding even more "pokes" of this sort, and making some hard hitting moves less effective without a lot of accumulated damage. That's not to say that the hard hits and hard hitters don't exist anymore, because of course they do, but Brawl certainly makes you earn your kills more than ever before. In this way Brawl is the most balanced game in the series.
The difference in the feel of the play may be somewhat disheartening at first, perhaps even disappointing to those expecting to pick up Brawl and be just as good as they were in Melee right away. Luckily most of the learning seems to come quickly for most, much like it did when switching from the N64 version of Smash to Melee. A few hours of solid play and the feel of the game grows on you and eventually becomes second nature again.
Massive attempts have been made to revamp the single player experience in Brawl as compared to Melee. Subspace Emissary, a fairly lengthy story type mode, has been added, and the modes from Melee return as well. The results of the revamp are somewhat mixed. While there is more to do playing single player in Brawl as opposed to the older two games, and while what there is to do is much better than the predecessors, Smash Bros. simply doesn't hold its charm in the single player arena. Don't kid yourself if you think you're going to have as much fun playing single player as you do multiplayer. You won't. That is unless you're crazy. Personally, the most entertaining part of single player remains the Event Matches, and even then I seem to care much less about them this time around as compared to Melee. The meat of this game is its multiplayer. It always has been, and nothing changes here. I really can't even recommend this game to anyone who doesn't have someone else to play with. A great addition to the single player is the ability to create custom levels, but of course this addition benefits the multiplayer far more than the single player.
Which brings us to our next topic of discussion: online play. The good news is... Brawl has it! And that's about when the good news ends. Nintendo continues their tyranny of separate friend codes for each game, making adding friends and playing with them far more of a hassle than it should be. Additionally, online "play anyone" matches have so far been pretty horrible with lag, constant disconnects and trouble finding opponents. Perhaps this will improve over time, perhaps not. We can only hope that it does. Friend matches fare somewhat better but are still far from perfect in terms of lag. Frankly it's downright pathetic how far behind Nintendo is with online play when compared to every other major console. Brawl could have been the Wii's flagship online title, but instead the experience has so far fallen somewhat below the status of "adequate." On the brighter side of online Brawl, watching and betting coins (earned throughout the game to be used to unlock additional trophies and the like) on previously recorded internet battles is surprisingly entertaining. I imagine many drunk nerds have already created drinking games based on the mode. Additionally, the feature to have custom user made levels automatically downloaded to your system every day is a great idea, and makes for new multiplayer experiences every day, if you so like. They may even inspire you with ideas of your next custom level.
If you like playing with items, there are tons to choose from in Brawl, including the much discussed Smash Ball. For those not in the know the Smash Ball is an item that appears randomly and floats around the level waiting to be beat open by players. The first one to beat the item open then gains the ability to unleash a ridiculously powered attack, often killing one or more of the other players in one move, keeping true to its namesake of "Final Smash." Final Smashes are fun diversions, but quickly grow old and are very imbalanced. Some moves are fairly easy to avoid and don't punish nearly as harshly as others do. Others are literally unavoidable and kill you no matter what. In addition to Smash Balls (heh), assist trophies have also been added into the mix. Assist Trophies are much like Pokeballs, in that you pick up the item and then a secondary character comes to the playing field to help you out. With assist trophies, though, your helper could be one of many Nintendo characters, instead of just a Pokemon. Additions like these were obvious attempts at making items more important to the game as a whole than they were in the previous two games. And they do affect the game more, that is if you keep those items on. I've found them to generally be pretty annoying and most people seem to prefer just keeping them off.
Much is to be said about the control in Brawl. As you likely already know, you have the ability to play brawl in many different ways: with a Wii remote, a Wii remote+nunchuck, the Classic Controller, or the traditional GameCube controller. I assume most people will be sticking with the latter, simply because it is what everyone is used to. The remote by itself is awkward, the remote with the nunchuck is surprisingly okay, and the Classic Controller would be fine if it was a more comfortable controller use in general. Whatever you like, you have your choice. A nice feature that utilizes the memory in the Wii remote is the ability to load your user name onto your remote and take it with you. That means no matter where you brawl your stats can be updated, if you care enough to load your profile back and forth from your controller.
Closing Comments
If you like battling siblings, you'll love Smash Bros.!
The logical part of my brain cringes to give this game a perfect score – for it is far from perfect. By this of course I'm mainly talking about online play, which as previously discussed falls so below par that it makes me want to take up the hobby of kicking puppies. But the idea of giving this game a less than perfect score makes me cringe even more, and I'll tell you why: This is the game that you and all your nerd friends will be playing for years to come when you get together. And you'll like doing so. You'll like it a lot. As far as replay value goes, you don't get more than Smash Bros. If you're a completionist you can kiss the rest of your life this year goodbye, because there are enough unlockables here to keep you busy for ages. Brawl fixes the major problems with Melee and introduces enough new things to keep things fresh, while still feelings like Smash Bros. ought to. This game is good, but I don't need to tell you that. Chances are you've already bought it.
