Super Smash Bros. Brawl went down a long road of agonizing delays before it finally came out. But is the end result any good? Super Smash Bros. is all about taking your favorite Nintendo characters and pitting them against eachother on various stages, and Brawl has a lot of that. With new characters like Snake, Sonic, King Dedede, and Diddy Kong, Its hard not like the character roster, which is now over 30 characters this time around. There are even more stages, like Warioware Inc., Pictochat, and Delfino Plaza.
The newest game mechanic in SSBB is the Smash Ball. If your character hits this ball enough times in battle, he/she will start to glow, and by pressing the B button, you are able to unleash a unique, devastating attack on your enemies.
Unlike Melee, Brawl’s adventure mode (called the Subspace Emissary) has an actual storyline behind it; but the lack of voice acting just leaves you with cutscenes where the characters are grunting at eachother. Even then, the adventure mode is a lot longer in Brawl (clocking in around 9-10 hours), and is the fastest way to unlock all of the characters. The main flaw with the new adventure mode is that it is extremely repetitive, with all of the stages being platformers with easy to kill enemies. There is a new game mechanic called stickers that let you power up your character in the game, but it cant be used outside of The Subspace Emissary; plus, the enemies are easy to kill without the stickers that you eventually forget about them until you encounter one of the many boss fights. The boss fights are probably the most satisfying part of the SSE. The only other main flaw of the SSE is right before you face the final boss; you have to go through practically the entire game again in a segment called The Great Maze. The Great Maze will take you at least a few hours to get through, backtracking through all of the previous levels and killing mini bosses.
Outside of the Subspace Emissary, there is a lot to do in SSBB, all of the stadium challenges are back, including a new boss rush mode which lets you fight all of the bosses after you’ve completed the SSE. There’s still Event Mode (which now has co-op events), Classic Mode, and All Star Mode from SSB Melee. Of course in multiplayer you have Brawl, the standard 2-4 player mode that lets you smash your opponents face in, as well as Tournament Mode and Special Brawl (which now has customizable options).
The biggest addition to the series, however, is online play. You are able to play against your friends (using friend codes of course) or play against random people across the world. Its an OK mode, but I’d stick to just random battles rather than with friends as they are the easiest to get into.
The biggest problem I have with the game is the changes that have been made to past characters. They’ve axed Mario’s Down+B Tornado move for the horrid FLUDD (which does no damage, it just sprays the enemy away from you). Also, Link feels much heavier and slower in this game than in Melee. There are also some stages in the game that I feel are there just because Nintendo can say ‘we have X number of stages’. The Electroplankton stage, for example. I feel like not enough effort was put into the making of the stage. It just doesn’t seem practical for this kind of game.
There is also a Vault mode that lets you view your trophy and sticker collections, view saved replay and snapshot data, and view a list of games Nintendo has released over the years. Also in the Vault, you are able to play Masterpieces. Masterpeices are retro game demos such as Donkey Kong, Metroid, and Mario Bros. This is severely flawed, however, as you have to exit the game and go to the Wii Shop channel to access them when they could’ve easily implemented these demos within the game disc itself. The biggest option in Vault, the stage creator lets you create and share stages via Nintendo Wi-Fi service. The creator is pretty bare-bones in terms of what you can do, but you can make some pretty interesting stages.
Lastly, the soundtrack of SSBB is probably one of the most memorable feats of the game. Featuring a list of over 300 remixed Nintendo songs (including classics like Stickerbush Symphony from DKC2, or Rainbow Road from Mario Kart Double Dash), This has to be the best remixed soundtrack ever.
Super Smash Bros. Brawl is a great fighting game that boasts one of the biggest and best remixed soundtracks I’ve ever heard, but I do think there are some unwanted changes to veteran characters.
Pros:
· Lots of characters and stages to choose from.
· Cool new Items like the Smash Ball and Assist Trophy.
· Stage creator.
· Online play.
· Boss Rush is fun.
Cons:
· Subspace Emissary is very repetitive.
· Some of the stages (such as the Electroplankton stage) seem to be there just to bloat the games number of stages.
· Bare-bones options for the stage creator.
· Smash vets will not like some of the changes that have been made to veteran characters such as Mario and Link.
· No more wave-dashing.