Super Smash Bros. Brawl (Wii)
The Super Smash Bros. series is one that seems to be constantly getting better over time, with each new installment adding new characters, items, and stages from the history of Nintendo while also refining the mechanics of the platform fighting genre it created. However, there is a bit of a black sheep in this mostly linear progression of improvement, and that would be the third installment, Super Smash Bros. Brawl. While Brawl contains the same crossover appeal and accessible fighting style as the other games in the series, it stands out for trying to shake up its formula more than other titles, but diverting away from the tried and true can help it just as much as hurt it at times.
Luckily for fans of Super Smash Bros. most of the important elements are there to ensure it is enjoyable at a base level before the extras are applied. Super Smash Bros. Brawl takes characters from the many successful franchises Nintendo owns while mixing in a few lesser known faces as well. While you can play as absolute icons of gaming like Mario, Pikachu, and Link, Super Smash Bros. also allows the player to pick characters like the Ice Climbers, a pair of eskimos who are fight together simultaneously, and Mr. Game & Watch, a two-dimensional fellow based on the many LCD handheld games Nintendo made and having attacks based on different titles from that series. Characters from a series can also be joined by their supporting casts, Mario’s enemy Bowser along for the fight but frequent kidnapee Princess Peach joining the battle too, many characters having their moves derived either directly from their games or at least based on what feels reasonable for them to use. Captain Falcon may have been only featured in racing games before his Super Smash Bros. debut, but his Falcon Punch, speedy moves, and focus on heavy physical blows perhaps define the character more than being one of many racers in the F-Zero series. Super Smash Bros. Brawl makes some excellent additions to the cast, many feeling somewhat overdue such as Wario, the greedy evil version of Mario who spun off to have franchises all his own, Olimar, the star of the Pikmin series who can pluck small plant people to use for his attacks, Diddy Kong, Donkey Kong’s small monkey partner who stars alongside him in his best adventures, and the pink puffball Kirby has his rivals Meta Knight and King Dedede both added. In a big step for the series, Nintendo also began to admit characters from outside its wheelhouse to the battle, Sega’s speedy mascot Sonic the Hedgehog finally facing off with Nintendo’s best while a surprise appearance by Metal Gear Solid’s Snake added another legendary gaming icon to the mix despite him being the most realistic looking human on the roster.
Snake is surprisingly not too out of place though thanks to a new art style that emphasizes realistic and dimmer textures than many of the characters featured are used to. The usually bright and colorful Mario has his overalls feature detailed denim with visible stitching, The Legend of Zelda characters Link, Zelda, and Ganondorf all carry over their darker and more serious designs from Twilight Princess, and even Pit, a character whose appearance as a small angel lead to his series being named Kid Icarus, has been given a more anime-inspired character design for his first appearance in over a decade. This doesn’t really seem to come with a drastic shift in game tone though, as Super Smash Bros. Brawl continues the series legacy of making its fighting game mechanics energetic, occasionally wacky, and approachable despite ditching the health bar systems found in most fighting games. To defeat an opponent in Super Smash Bros. Brawl, you must knock them off the screen, the size of which is determined by the specific level you’re fighting in. Whether you knock them off the stage and down a bottomless drop, off the edges of either side of the screen, or launch them towards the heavens, whenever they cross a certain boundary off-screen, they’ll lose a life. Different modes can make battles either about eliminating the most fighters in a set time or outliving your opponents with a set amount of lives, but whether you chose to do a one on one battle, a 2 vs. 2 team battle, or a 4 player free for all, Super Smash Bros. Brawl makes sure you can have a blast by having plenty of options and customizable parameters for your battles.
Fighting in Super Smash Bros. Brawl is first tied to your specific character choice, none of them having any complex combos but all having unique attacks assigned to simple combinations of buttons and directional presses. No matter what controller type you’re using, all characters have a set of normal moves that change depending on if they’re grounded or in the air and what direction you press in addition to your basic attack button. These moves are useful for racking up damage or chaining into more hits, but if you hit a direction harder when attacking on the ground, you can also pull off a Smash variant where the attack hits the foe farther away, the distance a foe is launched based on the percentages built up from receiving hits in the fight. Other options to soften up foes before the kill move include things like a grab that’s great for positioning foes and your character’s specific special moves, each one of the four on offer providing some unique ability. Characters like Fox and Falco from Star Fox embody the uses of special moves well, with their basic one being a projectile option, their down special being a reflector to bounce back projectiles used on them, their forward special providing a damaging movement option, and their up special giving them a vertical boost. Most characters in Super Smash Bros. Brawl can double jump to increase their mobility and help them get back to the stage if they’re knocked off, with the up special being a way to essentially add a third special jump, but a few characters with wings such as the diminutive swordsman Meta Knight can also glide back to stage and others like the balloon Pokemon Jigglypuff get additional jumps on top of their basic two. Tossing in a shielding option that allows you to take hits but breaks if used too much, and you’ve got the basics of Super Smash Bros. Brawl’s battle system, something that is easy to pick up and learn despite not rewarding button mashing. A newer player can easily pull off every move without having to learn anything complex, but a more experienced one will know which ones complement each other, which moves are more damaging or more lethal, and how to use the interplay between attack options to counter other players.
That isn’t to say Super Smash Bros. Brawl is well balanced though. Sadly, one of the things that holds Brawl back from being an advancement of the Super Smash Bros. formula are some unfortunate changes to the flow of the game caused by the developer getting scared of people embracing the previous title more as a competitive game than the fun party game he envisioned it as. Perhaps the most annoying feature meant to curb competitive interest in the game is the baffling tripping mechanic. There is a small chance that, when any character starts moving, they might trip, this cropping up randomly and leaving you open to attacks when it happens. Save for a few goofy looking tripping animations this adds nothing positive to the game, especially since Brawl offers plenty of legitimate challenges in its single player mode that can be enjoyable and incredibly tough until you’re punished for playing by a random trip. A few other flaws at the mechanical level are less annoying but still slow things down or make consistent play a bit less enjoyable than other iterations of the platform fighting genre. Super Smash Bros. Brawl is very floaty, characters taking a bit of time to fall out of the air when jumping or knocked into it, making for overall slower battles. There is a general fast pace to the action, but the action does feel a bit less kinetic because of the time it takes to drift around the air. Your kill moves also don’t have the punch needed to really communicate their kill power at times, it being difficult to tell if an attack will eliminate a foe because they drift away from it at a similar speed to when the move won’t kill them. Character balance is also pretty skewed in some areas, and while casual players might not encounter the power discrepancies as often, Meta Knight outclasses many characters with his speed and combo options in a game where most people are slow, with the more deliberate but powerful Ganondorf rendered almost useless since he can be easily outpaced despite his strength. Meanwhile, Pokemon Trainer, a character who can swap between three different Pokemon for battle, is unnecessarily kneecapped by having each Pokemon get tired if they battle for a certain amount of time, forcing the switch rather than just making the Pokemon worth switching between by being different options for different situations. There are still plenty of character types to pick from, such as characters who prefer to fight from range, heavy fighters who hit hard and are hard to knock away, and light speedsters who can rack up the damage quick but are easy to knock out. On a more casual level the cast imbalances won’t hurt too much, but the quirks in it still sneak in from time to time, reminding you of the odd design decisions the development team took.
There is definitely plenty to enjoy despite the small sabotages to more serious play, because when Brawl is adding something for its party play, single-player, or tributes to the franchises crossing over, it is spectacular. Super Smash Bros. Brawl delivers some of the best new stages to the series, whether it be places that do lean to more competitive play like the simple yet effective layouts of places like the Animal Crossing based Smashville and Yoshi’s Island or the ones that lean in towards their source material more. Delfino Plaza takes players on a flying tour to stops in the gorgeous tropical hubworld of Super Mario Sunshine, Pirate Ship puts players on a boat in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker’s Great Sea, Pictochat places characters in the DS’s weird drawing app to interact with large drawn-in hazards, and Mario Circuit takes place in an intersection of a Mario Kart course while drivers are racing about. When it does lean towards the gimmicky it can be a hard miss though, places like Mario Bros., a level based on the play area from the game of the same name, not really built to fit Super Smash Bros.’s fighting style due to the ceilings and strange level wraparound mechanic, and New Pork City feels like a weak attempt to duplicate the magic of Super Smash Bros. Melee’s stage with a huge level, but New Pork feels empty and random rather than the segmented design of Temple that allowed for long battles that shift from the dangerous exterior to the safer underground. Luckily, Temple is brought back with a few other stages from the previous Smsh game, leading to an excellent and diverse arrangement of levels that focus on different things like neutral layouts, stage specific hazards, horizontal length, or lack of areas to drop off. Every stage also comes with many background music options, Brawl perhaps having the best curated music collection of any Smash game. While future ones are better technically by having many of Brawl’s songs in them, there are very few stinkers here, where on top of a strong main theme with Latin chanting, it has music from all across the Nintendo universes remixed, recreated, or reproduced in their original forms, and with so many series already famous for musical excellence to draw from, Brawl’s soundscape is quite marvelous.
Items also add an injection of wild fun to multiplayer play, with players able to disable the ones they don’t like or turn the spawn rate up to get even more crazy. There are plenty of simple ones that add a decent new angle to a battle, such as the Beam Sword that can turn any character into a sword swinging fighter, the Smart Bomb that will explode when thrown, the Bunny Hood that will give you a big speed boot while worn, and the Pitfall that can lay a trap for players to fall into. There are also some more drastic items that can really turn the tides. The Hammer and Golden Hammer both swing automatically and can hit players incredibly far away, healing items like the Heart Container can undo loads of damage, the Dragoon essentially turns into an instant kill attack if you collect all three pieces, and the Lightning Bolt will shrink all other players, but if you want a more fair fight instead of a wildly swinging one, disabling any item is just a menu option away. More interesting items come in the form of Poke Balls that can call in any of a strong selection of Pokemon to execute attacks, but Brawl also adds in the Assist Trophy where characters from different video games drop in to do the same. Isaac from Golden Sun can be called in to push players around with Move, Andross can appear in the background and spit tiles at fighters, Lakitu from Mario will fly in and drop spiny turtles onto the battlefield, and even a Nintendog might show up and paw at the screen, blocking your view of the battle as it just wants to play. While some Assist Trophies like the rambling Mr. Resetti or the time slowing powers of Shadow the Hedgehog aren’t the best, they generally add a quick and not too intrusive new character to the fight, but more wild swings are found in Super Smash Bros. Brawl’s Final Smashes. A Smash Ball will fly into the battle at times, players aiming to break it open with attacks so they can unleash a powerful super move. What this could be varies wildly between characters, but common threads include moves that capture an opponent to deal heavy damage like the powerful swordsman Ike capturing people in the multi-hit Great Aether sword swing, a beam or blast that goes across the screen like the armored bounty hunter Samus’s Zero Laser, a power-up mode where a character becomes a more capable version of themselves like the dinosaur Yoshi gaining wings and fire breath for Super Dragon, or ones that inflicts statuses like Luigi’s Negative Zone making an area of odd control swapping and power sapping. Pit calling in divebombing troops and Olimar flying off-screen while monsters attack his foes in his absence defy such easy classification, but the variety makes them feel more unique and character-derived even if it leads to power imbalances. Sonic can fly around the screen freely and quickly while invincible as Super Sonic, basically able to kill with a touch to anyone with a decent bit of damage on them, but Donkey Kong has to play his bongos with rhythmic button taps to even lightly nudge players about. The fight for the Smash Ball can still add a tense change of objectives to a battle though as everyone vies for getting their special power, even if that’s just because using their weak one is better than a stronger one getting executed by their opponent.
When it comes to single-player content, Brawl might be top dog of the series. While it is definitely fun for multiplayer, Brawl offers up a lot to do even if you don’t have human players around or fighting computer controlled opponents in regular matches doesn’t do it for you. Outside of the Classic mode that is a sequence of somewhat random fights and All-Star where you fight every character in the game, Brawl also has the enormous Adventure mode it calls Subspace Emissary. In a world where Nintendo characters are all trophies that come to life for battle, someone is sending out troops and strange creatures to pull the world’s locations into a dark place known as Subspace. Using series villains like Bowser and Wario as antagonist for characters who don’t usually fight them and adding boss monsters like the dragon Rayquaza from Pokemon and the dragon Ridley from Metroid for more challenging battles than regular Smash bouts, Subspace builds up a story of a growing group of good characters gathering together to face the strange evil behind it all, all without saying almost anything in its cutscenes. Sometimes the wordlessness works and others it feels like even a sentence or two could work better, but seeing the characters interact is a treat, the levels in this mode even feeling more like traditional sidescrolling platform game stages despite using Smash’s battle mechanics. Characters are all locked to the same movement speed to make the platforming more amenable than the fighting game systems and stats that otherwise could hurt them here, and the levels along the way even try to come up with some unique gimmicks so they feel like they could work in a regular game. Areas focused on vertical climbs, retreading similar areas after opening new paths, navigating a huge maze of different locations, and having areas based on forests, laboratories, mountains, and in Subspace itself keep things interesting, as do the many monsters made just for this game. You will face familiar enemies from other series such as Goombas and Hammer Bros from Super Mario Bros., but the Subspace Army is packed with newly invented enemies who feature unique gimmicks, from the Primids who come in with different powers and weapons despite being the grunts of the enemy forces, the Bucculuses who pop out of the ground to give you deadly kisses, the Bytans who multiply if you don’t kill them quickly enough, and the giant scythe-swinging Greaps who hit hard enough to send you flying to your doom. Even unique new bosses like the mechanical gorilla-like monster Galeom and the two-sided sword and gun wielding Duon serve this specialized army. Difficulty options on top of healing items cropping up and the option to tackle it co-op gives Subspace some room to be difficult or easy depending on how you want to tackle it, making it the standout mode even if a few levels or enemy gimmicks are a bit weak or not pronounced enough to be effective.
The last big appeal for a player going solo though is the incredible amount of collectibles on offer. Brawl has an absurd amount of stuff to collect, from the trophies that provide histories on Nintendo characters to the Stickers that show past art of even more obscure franchise personalities to the music itself. Unlocking everything will involve dipping into modes like Boss Rush mode and the Home Run Contest where you try to hit a sandbag as far as you can, but replaying other modes with all the characters is also required to get everything. Every character has a trophy for completing Classic and All-Star, some have other unlockables for playing on certain difficulties in those modes, and this is on top of already having unlockable characters who can join the battle either by finding them in Subspace Emissary, playing enough versus matches, or completing a more unusual objective. While unlockable characters and stages have a clear impact on gameplay and music and trophies add more color to the game, Stickers are somewhat unfortunate in design. Appearing randomly in battles, the player can use these for stat boosts in the Adventure mode, but to get them all requires incredible luck. You can get duplicates of them and there’s no way to influence which one drops, so getting all 700 is less a goal to shoot for and more something you can accidentally achieve by playing enough. It took my brother and me years of frequent play to get them all, and by the time we did, the next Super Smash Bros. title was about to be released. The less directionless collectibles and challenges do provide excellent tests for your mastery of the game though, even if the base mechanics involved in their collection were somewhat hampered by the choice to slow things down a bit.
THE VERDICT: An odd art direction and a few failed gimmicks can’t hold Super Smash Bros. Brawl back from being a powerful combination of some of Nintendo’s best characters and franchises with the easily learned platform fighting style of play. A solid collection of characters from the history of one of gaming’s biggest and most varied companies plus a few faces from outside that history lead to a great game for fans of many series, and the collectibles provide many nods to that legacy on top of giving players plenty to do across its many modes. Subspace Emissary is definitely the crown jewel with its platform game approach to its story and levels, but the multiplayer gameplay is still fun and full of options to spice things up like items and different stage designs. There was an unfortunate choice to add things like tripping and an odd floatiness to the fighting that subtly undermines many areas of the game, but despite the moments of self-sabotage that weaken it, Brawl still executes most of what it wants to do excellently and players can still derive hours of entertainment from all the parts that still work well.
And so, I give Super Smash Bros. Brawl for Wii…
A GREAT rating. If you had asked me if Brawl was the best Smash game ever around its release, I probably would have said it was, but that was youthful naivety blinding me. To see so many characters like Diddy Kong and Wario who deserved to get in finally present, to see the many stages, to hear the incredible soundtrack… it was easy to be blinded by the reverence for Nintendo’s history, the opening up to third parties like Sega and Konami, and the incredible amount of content in the form of an absurd amount of mostly achievable collectables and modes like Subspace Emissary that mixed things up in a unique and exciting manner. The glow of Brawl’s arrival with so many new wonderful things made it easier for a young player to overlook things like the annoyance of random tripping, the slow speed of the affair, and the difficulty in reading a move’s kill potential due to how characters seem to drift through the sky rather than get launched at appropriate speeds. The gimmickry did still register though, with certain stages and items feeling like they leaned too far into influencing the fights, but the options allowed those issues to be ignored in favor of the many solid stages and items still present when those were brushed to the side. Age has certainly given me the wisdom to look at Brawl more critically than the excited me of yesteryear would have, but there is still an incredible amount of content to be enjoyed that delivers on providing both fun battles and ones with unique twists to them, they just all have to do so while small design decisions slightly weigh them down.
If the other games in the Super Smash Bros. series hadn’t done the core fighting better, Brawl might not be the odd one out, but it manages to overcome some of its issues by providing a more well-rounded experience than many of the others. With plenty a single person can tackle on their own and the customizability to make multiplayer the level of chaos you wish to experience, Brawl still survives pushing itself closer to a party game instead of a fighting game. Almost every ingredient that makes the series great is present like accessibility, variety in the cast, and all the extra touches like Assist Trophies and special modes, and that’s all on top of the new beefy adventure mode and a slew of unlockable content. While Brawl can’t lay claim to the tile of the best game in the Super Smash Bros. series, it still stands well above plenty of party and fighting games because of those strengths.